Completely coincidentally, my most excellent boss did a talk a few sessions ahead of me which was the American Civil War version of the same thing I highly recommend it. John Sheridan – Lincoln, Lee and ICT: Lessons from the Civil War.

So you want to change the world?

Here are the tactics I use to some success. I heartily recommend you find what works for you. Then you will have no excuse but to join me in implementing Operation World Awesomeness.

The Short Version:

No wasted movement.

The Long Version:

1) Pick your battles: there are a million things you could do. What do you most care about? What can you maintain constructive and positive energy about even in the face of towering adverseries and significant challenges? What do you think you can make a difference in? There is a subtle difference between choosing to knock down a mountain with your forehead, and renting a bulldozer. If you find yourself expending enormous energy on something, but not making a difference, you need to be comfortable to change tactics.

2) Work to your strengths: everyone is good at something. If you choose to contribute to your battle in a way that doesn’t work to your strengths, whatever they are, then you are wasting energy. You are not contributing in the best way you can. You need to really know yourself, understand what you can and can’t do, then do what you can do well, and supplement your army with the skills of others. Everyone has a part to play and a meaningful way to contribute. FWIW, I work to know myself through my martial arts training, which provides a useful cognitive and physical toolkit to engage in the world with clarity. Find what works for you. As Sun Tzu said: know yourself.

3) Identify success: Figure out what success actually looks like, otherwise you don’t have either a measurement of progress, nor a measurement of completion. I’ve seen too many activists get caught up on a battle and continued fighting well beyond the battle being won, or indeed keep hitting their heads against a battle that can’t be won. It’s important to continually be monitoring and measuring, holding yourself to account, and ensuring you are making progress. If not, change tactics.

4) Reconnaissance: do your research. Whatever your area of interest there is likely a body of work that has come before you that you can build upon. Learn about the environment you are working in, the politics, the various motivations and interests at play, the history and structure of your particular battlefield. Find levers in the system that you can press for maximum effect, rather than just straining against the weight of a mountain. Identify the various moving parts of the system and you have the best chance to have a constructive and positive influence.

5) Networks & Mentors: identify all the players in your field. Who is involved, influential, constructive, destructive, effective, etc. It is important to understand the motivations at play so you can engage meaningfully, collaboratively and build a mutually beneficial network in the persuit of awesomeness. Strong mentors are a vital asset and they will teach you how to navigate the rapids and make things happen. A strong network of allies is also vital to keep you on track, and accountable, and true to your own purpose. People usually strive to meet the expectations of those around them, so surround yourself with high expectations. Knowing your network also helps you identify issues and opportunities early.

6) Sustainability: have you put in place a succession plan? How will your legacy continue on without you? It’s important if your work is to continue on that it not be utterly reliant upon one individual. You need to share your vision, passion and success. Glory shared is glory sustained, so bring others on board, encourage and support them to succeed. Always give recognition and thanks to people who do great stuff.

7) Patience: remember the long game. Nothing changes overnight. It always take a lot of work and persistence, and remembering the long game will help during those times when it doesn’t feel like you are making progress. Again, your network is vital as it will help you maintain your strength, confidence and patience Speaking of which, a huge thanks to Geoff Mason for reminding me of this one on the day.

8) Shifting power: it is worth noting that we are living in the most exciting of times. Truly. Individuals are more empowered than ever before to do great things. The Internet has created a mechanism for the mass distribution of power, but putting into the hands of all people (all those online anyway), the tools to:

1. publish and access knowledge;
2. communicate and collaborate with people all around the world;
3. monitor and hold others to account including companies, governments and individuals;
4. act as enforcers for whatever code or law they uphold. This is of course quite controversial but fascinating nonetheless; and
5. finally, with the advances in 3D printing and nanotechnology, we are on the cusp of all people having unprecedented access to property.

Side note: Poverty and hunger, we shall overcome you yet! Then we just urgently need to prioritise education of all the people. But that is a post for another day Check out my blog post on Unicorns and Doom, which goes into my thoughts on how online culture is fundamentally changing society.

This last aspect is particularly fascinating as it changes the game from one between the haves and the have nots, to one between those with and those without skills and knowledge. We are moving from a material wealth differentiation in society towards an intellectual wealth differentiation. Arguable we always had the latter, but the former has long been a bastion for law, structures, power and hierarchies. And it is all changing.

“What better place than here, what better time than now?” — RATM

I feel humbled, amazed and extremely extremely thankful to be part of such an incredible community in Australia and New Zealand, and a lot of people have stood up and supported me with something I felt very uncomfortable having to deal with.

Basically, a large sponsor pulled out from the TBL Down Under Tour (which I was the coordinator for, supported by the incredible and hard working Jan Bryson) just a few weeks before the start, leaving us with a substantial hole in the budget. I managed to find sponsorship to cover most of the gap, but was left $20k short (for expenses only) and just decided to figure it out myself. Friends rallied around and suggested the crowdsourcing approach which I was hesitant to do, but eventually was convinced it wouldn’t be a bad thing.

We crowdsourced less than two days ago and raised around $6k ($4,800 on GoGetFunding and $1,200 from Jeff’s earlier effort). This was incredible, especially the wonderfully supportive and positive comments that people left. Honestly, it was amazing. And then, much to my surprise and shock, Linux Australia offered to contribute the rest of the $20k. Silvia is closing the crowdsourcing site as I write this and I’m thankful to her for setting it up in the first place.

I am truly speechless. And humbled. And….

It is worth noting that stress and exhaustion aside, and though I put over 350 hours of my own time into this project, for me it has been completely worth it. It has brought many subjects dear to my heart into the mainstream public narrative and media including open government, open data, open source, net neutrality, data retention and indeed, the importance of geeks. I think such a step forward in public narrative will help us take a few more steps towards the the future where Geeks Rule Over Kings ;) (my lca2013 talk)

It was also truly a pleasure to hang out with Tim and Rosemary who are extremely lovely people, clever and very interesting to chat to.

For the haters No I am not suffering from cultural cringe. No I am not needing an external voice to validate perspectives locally. There is only one TBL and if he was Australian I’d still have done what I did

More to come in the wrap up post on the weekend, but thank you again to all the individuals who contributed, and especially to Linux Australia for offering to fill the gap. There are definitely lessons learnt from this experience which I’ll outline later, but if I was an optimist before, this gives me such a sense of confidence, strength and support to continue to do my best to serve my community and the broader society as best I can.

And I promise I won’t burn out in the meantime

Po is looking forward to spending more time with his human. We all made sacrifices (old photo courtesy of Mary Gardiner)

It’s important to note, I did this trip in a personal capacity only, and was sure to be clear I was not representing the Australian government in any official sense. I saw it as a bit of a public servant cultural exchange, which I think is probably a good idea even between agencies let alone governments

I got to hear about some of the key NZ Government data projects, including data.govt.nz, data.linz.govt.nz, the statistical data service, some additional geospatial and linked data work, some NZ government planning and efforts around innovation and finding more efficient ways to do tech, and much more. I also found myself in various conversations with extremely clever people about science and government communications, public engagement, rockets, circus and more.

It was awesome, inspiring, informative and exhausting. But this blog post aims to capture the key ideas from the visit. I’d love your feedback on the ideas/frameworks below, and I’ll extrapolate on some of these ideas in followup posts.

I’m also looking forward to working more collaboratively with my colleagues in New Zealand, as well as from across all three spheres of government in Australia. I’d like to set up a way for government people in the open data and open government space across Australia/New Zealand to freely share information and technologies (in code), identify opportunities to collaborate, share their policies and planning for feedback and ideas, and generally work together for more awesome outcomes all round. Any suggestions for how best to do this? GovDex? A new thing? Will continue public discussions on the Gov 2.0 mailing list, but I think it’ll be also useful to connect govvies privately whilst encouraging individuals and agencies to promote their work publicly.

This blog post is a collaboration with the wonderful Alison Stringer, in a personal capacity only. Enjoy!

* 3000 may be a wee stretch

Table of Contents

Open Data

• Strategic/Policy Building Blocks
• Technical Building Blocks
• References

Digital and Open Government

• Some imperatives for changing how we do government
• Policy/strategic components

Open data

Strategic/policy building blocks

Below are some basic building blocks we have found to be needed for an open data strategy to be sustainable and effective in gaining value for both the government and the broader community including industry, academia and civil society. It is based on the experiences in NZ, Aus and discussions with open data colleagues around the world. Would love your feedback, and I’ll expand this out to a broader post in the coming weeks.

• Policy- open as the default, specifically encouraging and supporting a proactive and automated disclosure of government information in an appropriate, secure and sustainable way. Ideally, each policy should be managed as an iterative and live document that responds to changing trends, opportunities and challenges:
  • Copyright and licensing – providing clear guidance that government information can be legally used. Using simple, permissive and known/trusted licences is important to avoid confusion.
  • Procurement – procurement policy creates a useful and efficient lever to establish proactive “business as usual” disclosure of information assets, by requiring new systems to support such functionality and publishing in open data formats from the start. This also means the security and privacy of data can be built into the system.
  • Proactive publishing – a policy of proactive disclosure helps avoid the inefficiencies of retrospective data publishing. It is important to also review existing assets and require an implementation plan from all parts of government on how they will open up their information assets, and then measure, monitor and report on the progress.
• Legislation – ensuring any legislative blockers to publishing data are sorted, for instance, in some jurisdictions civil servants are personally liable if someone takes umbrage to the publication of something. Indeed there may be some issues here that are perceptions as opposed to reality. A review of any relevant legislation and plan to fix any blockers to publishing information assets is recommended.
• Leadership/permission – this is vital, especially in early days whilst open data is still being integrated as business as usual. It should be as senior as possible.
• Resourcing – it is very hard to find new money in governments in the current fiscal environment. However, we do have people. Resourcing the technical aspects of an open data project would only need a couple of people and a little infrastructure that can both host and point to data and data services. The UK open data platform runs on less than £460K per year, including the costs of three staff). But there needs to be a policy of distributed publishing. In the UK there are ~760 registered publishers of data throughout government. It would be useful to have at least one data publisher (probably to work part of their job only and alongside the current senior agency data champion role) who spends a day or two a week just seeking out and publishing data for their department, and identifying opportunities to automate data publishing with the data.govt.nz team.
• Value realisation – including:
  • Improved policy development across government through better and early access to data and tools to use data
  • Knowledge transfer across government, especially given so many senior public servants are retiring in the coming years
  • Improved communication of complex issues to the public, better public engagement and exploration of data – especially with data visualisation tools
  • Monitoring, reporting, measuring clear outcomes (productivity savings, commercialisation, new business or products/projects, innovation in government, improved efficiency in Freedom of Information responses, efficiencies in not replicating data or reports, effectiveness and metrics around projects, programs and portfolios)
  • Application of data in developing citizen centric services and information
  • Supporting and facilitating commercialisation opportunities
• Agency collaboration – the importance of agency collaboration can not be overstated. Especially on sharing/using/reusing data, on sharing knowledge and skills, on public engagement and communications. Also on working together where projects or policy areas might be mutually beneficial and on public engagement such that there is a consistent and effective dialogue with citizens. This shouldn’t be a bottlenecked approach, but rather a distributed network of individuals at different levels and in different functions.
• Technology – need to have the right bits in place, or the best policy/vision won’t go anywhere See below for an extrapolation on the technical building blocks.
• Public engagement – a public communications and engagement strategy is vital to build and support a community of interest and innovation around government data.

Technical building blocks

Below are some potential technical building blocks for supporting a whole of government(s) approach to information management, proactive publishing and collaboration. Let me know what you think I’m missing

Please note, I am not in any way suggesting this should be a functional scope for a single tool. On the contrary, I would suggest for each functional requirement the best of breed tool be found and that there be a modular approach such that you can replace components as they are upgraded or as better alternatives arise. There is no reason why a clever frontend tool couldn’t talk to a number of backend services.

• Copyright and licensing management – if an appropriately permissive copyright licence is applied to data/content at the point of creation, and stored in the metadata, it saves on the cost of administration down the track. The Australian Government default license has been determined as Creative Commons BY, so agencies and departments should use that, regardless of whether the data/content is ever publishing publicly. The New Zealand government recommends CC-BY as the default for data and information published for re-use.
• An effective data publishing platform(s) (see Craig Thomler’s useful postabout different generations of open data platforms) that supports the publishing, indexing and federation of data sources/services including:
  • Geospatial data – one of the pivotal data sets required for achieving citizen centric services, and in bringing the various other datasets together for analysis and policy development.
  • Real time data – eg, buses, weather, sensor networks
  • Statistical data – eg census and surveys, where raw access to data is only possible through an API that gives a minimum number of results so as to make individual identification difficult
  • Tabular data – such as spreadsheets or databases of records in structured format
• Identity management – for publishers at the very least.
• Linked data and metadata system(s) – particularly where such data can be automatically inferred or drawn from other systems.
• Change control – the ability to push or take updates to datasets, or multiple files in a dataset, including iterative updates from public or private sources in a verifiable way.
• Automation tools for publishing and updating datasets including where possible, from their source, proactive system-to-system publishing.
• Data analysis and visualisation tools – both to make it easier to communicate data, but also to help people (in government and the public) analyse and interact with any number of published datasets more effectively. This is far more efficient for government than each department trying to source their own data visualisation and analysis tools.
• Reporting tools – that clearly demonstrate status, progress, trends and value of open data and open government on an ongoing basis. Ideally this would also feed into a governance process to iteratively improve the relevant policies on an ongoing basis.

Some open data references

• There are a lot of good OECD reports on open data that include metrics around value realisation
• I linked to some key Australian government policies and principles in this space in my recent NetHui speech
• The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner does incredible work in this space
• Several NZers had a lot of good things to say about the Australian geospatial project SISStack
• It is worth looking at the technology, human resourcing and policies that support http://data.gov.uk/ and especially, the UK Government Digital Service office. A skunkworks for innovating, improving service delivery and saving money across the UK Government.
• Opening Government Data and Information – Some really useful NZ Govt content

Digital and Open Government

Although I was primarily in New Zealand to discuss open data, I ended up entering into a number of discussions about the broader aspects of digital and open government, which is entirely appropriate and a natural evolution. I was reminded of the three pillars of open government that we often discuss in Australia which roughly translate to:

• Transparency
• Participation
• Citizen centricity

There is a good speech by my old boss, Minister Kate Lundy, which explains these in some detail.

I got into a couple of discussions which went into the concept of public engagement at length. I highly recommend those people check out the Public Sphere consultation methodology that I developed with Minister Kate Lundy which is purposefully modular so that you can adapt it to any community and how they best communicate, digitally or otherwise. It also is focused on getting evidence based, peer reviewed, contextually analysed and useful actual outcomes. It got an international award from the World eDemocracy Forum, which was great to see. Particularly check out how we applied computer forensics tools to help figure out if a consultation is being gamed by any individual or group.

When I consider digital government, I find myself standing back in the first instance to consider the general role of government in a digital society. I think this is an important starting point as our understanding is broadly out of date. New Zealand has definitions in the State Sector Act 1988, but they aren’t necessarily very relevant to 2013, let alone an open and transparent digital government.

Some imperatives for changing how we do government

Below are some of the interesting imperatives I have identified as key drivers for changing how we do government:

• Changing public expectations – public expectations have fundamentally changed, not just with technology and everyone being connected to each other via ubiquitous mobile computing, but our basic assumptions and instincts are changing, such as the innate assumption of routing around damage, where damage might be technical or social. I’ve gone into my observations in some depth in a blog post called Online Culture – Part 1: Unicorns and Doom (2011).
• Tipping point of digital engagement with government – in 2009 Australia had more citizens engaging with government  online than through any other means. This digital tipping point creates a strong business case to move to digitally delivered services, as a digital approach enables more citizens to self serve online and frees up expensive human resources for our more vulnerable, complex or disengaged members of the community.
• Fiscal constraints over a number of years have largely led to IT Departments having done more for less for years, with limited investment in doing things differently, and effectively a legacy technology millstone. New investment is needed but no one has money for it, and IT Departments have in many cases, resorted to being focused on maintenance rather than project work (an upgrade of a system that maintains the status quo is still maintenance in my books). Systems have reached a difficult point where the fat has been trimmed and trimmed, but the demands have grown. In order to scale government services to growing needs in a way that enables more citizens to self service, new approaches are necessary, and the capability to aggregate services and information (through open APIs and open data) as well as user-centric design underpins this capability.
• Disconnect between business and IT – there has been for some time a growing problem of business units disengaging with IT. As cheap cloud services have started to appear, many parts of government (esp Comms and HR) have more recently started to just avoid IT altogether and do their own thing. On one hand this enables some more innovative approaches, but it also leads directly to a problem in whole of government consistency, reliability, standards and generally a distribution of services which is the exact opposite of a citizen centric approach. It’s important that we figure out how to get IT re-engaged in the business, policy and strategic development of government such that these approaches are more informed and implementable, and such that governments use, develop, fund and prioritise technology in alignment with a broader vision.
• Highly connected and mobile community and workforce – the opportunities (and risks) are immense, and it is important that governments take an informed and sustainable approach to this space. For instance, in developing public facing mobile services, a mobile optimised web services approach is more inclusive, cost efficient and sustainable than native applications development, but by making secure system APIs and open data available, the government can also facilitate public and private competition and innovation in services delivery.
• New opportunities for high speed Internet are obviously a big deal in Australia and New Zealand at the moment with the new infrastructure being rolled out (FTTP in both countries), and setting up to better support and engaging with citizens digitally now, before mainstream adoption, is rather important and urgent.
• Impact of politics and media on policy – the public service is generally to have an evidence-based approach to policy, and where this approach is developed in a transparent and iterative way, in collaboration with the broader society, it means government can engage directly with citizens rather than through the prism of politics or the media, each which have their own motivations and imperatives.
• Prioritisation of ICT spending – it is difficult to ensure the government investment and prioritisation of ICT projects aligns with the strategic goals of the organisation and government, especially where the goals are not clearly articulated.
• Communications and value realisation – with anyone able to publish pretty much anything, it is incumbent on governments to be a part of the public narrative as custodians of a lot of information and research. By doing this in a transparent and apolitical way, the public service can be a value and trusted source.
• The expensive overhead of replication of effort across governments – consolidating where possible is vital to improve efficiencies, but also to put in place the mechanisms to support whole of government approaches.
• Skills – a high technical literacy directly supports the capacity to innovate across government and across the society in every sector. As such this should be prioritised in our education systems, way above and well beyond “office productivity” tools.

Policy/strategic components

• Strategic approach to information policy – many people looking at information policy tend to look deeply at one or a small number of areas, but it is only in looking at all of the information created by government, and how we can share, link, re-use, and analyse that we will gain the significant policy, service delivery and social/economic benefits and opportunities. When one considers geospatial, tabular, real time and statistical (census and survey) data, and then the application of metadata and linked data, it gets rather complicated. But we need to be able to interface effectively with these different data types.
• Facilitating public and private innovation – taking a “government as a platform” approach, including open data and open APIs, such that industry and civil society can innovate on top of government systems and information assets, creating new value and services to the community.
• Sector and R&D investment – it is vital that government ensured that the investment in digital industries, internal innovation and indeed R&D more broadly, aligns with the strategic vision. This means understanding how to measure and monitor digital innovation more effectively and not through the lens of traditional approaches that may not be relevant, such as the number of patents and other IP metrics. The New Zealand and Australian business and research community need to make the most of their governments’ leadership in Open Government. The Open Government Partnership network might provide a way to build upon and export this expertise.
• Exports – by creating local capacity in the arena of improved and citizen-centric services delivery, Australia and New Zealand set themselves up nicely for exporting services and products to Asia Pacific, particularly given the rapid uptake of countries in the region to join the Open Government Partnership which requires signatories to develop plans around topics such as open data, citizen centricity and parliamentary transparency, all of which we are quite skilled in.
• Distributed skunkworks for government – developing the communities/spaces/tools across government to encourage and leverage the skills and enthusiasm of clever geeks both internally (internal hackdays, communities of practice) and externally (eg – GovHack). No one can afford new resources, but allocating a small amount of time from the existing workforce who are motivated to do great things is a cost efficient and empowering way to create a distributed skunkworks. And as people speak to each other about common problems and common solutions we should see less duplication of these solutions and improved efficiency across agencies.
• Iterative policy – rethinking how policy is developed, implemented, measured and governed to take a more iterative and agile approach that a) leverages the skills and expertise of the broader community for more evidence based and peer reviewed policy outcomes and b) is capable of responding effectively and in a timely manner to new challenges and opportunities as they arise. It would also be useful to build better internal intelligence systems for an improved understanding of the status of projects, and improved strategic planning for success.
• An Information Commissioner for New Zealand – an option for a policy lead on information management to work closely with departments to have a consolidated, consistent, effective and overall strategic approach to the management, sharing and benefits realisation of government information. This would also build the profile of Open Government in New Zealand and hopefully be the permanent solution to current resourcing challenges. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, and similar roles at State level, include the function of Information Commissioner, Privacy Commissioner and Free of Information Commissioner, and these combined give a holistic approach to government information policy that ideally balances open information and privacy. In New Zealand it could be a role that builds on recent information policies, such as NZGOAL which is designed, amongst other things, to replace bespoke content licences. Bespoke licences create an unnecessary liability issue for departments.
• Citizen centricity – the increasing importance of consolidating government service and information delivery, putting citizens (and business) at the centre of the design. This is achieved through open mechanisms (eg, APIs) to interface with government systems and information such that they can be managed in a distributed and secure way, but aggregated in a thematic way.
• Shared infrastructure and services – the shared services being taken up by some parts of the New Zealand Government is very encouraging to see, particularly when such an approach has been very successful in the ACT and SA state governments in Australia, and with several shared infrastructure and services projects at a national level in Australia including the AGIMO network and online services, and the NECTAR examples (free cloud stack tools for researchers). Shared services create the capacity for a consistent and consolidated approach, as well as enable the foundations of citizen centric design in a practical sense.

Some additional reading and thoughts

Digital literacy and ICT skills – should be embedded into curriculum and encouraged across the board. I did a paper on this as a contribution to the National Australian Curriculum consultation in 2010 with Senator Kate Lundy which identified three areas of ICT competency: 1) Productivity skills, 2) Online engagement skills, & 3) Automation skills as key skills for all citizens. It’s also worth looking at the NSW Digital Citizenship courseware. It’s worth noting that public libraries are a low cost and effective way to deliver digital services, information and skills to the broader community and minimise the issue of the digital divide.

Media data – often when talking about open data, media is completely forgotten. Video, audio, arts, etc. The GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) are all over this and should be part of the conversation about how to manage this kind of content across whole of government.

Just a few additional links for those interested, somewhat related to some of the things I discussed this last week.

• Creating Open Government (for a Digital Society) (2012)
• Speech from Nethui on Open Government and Gov 2.0 (2012)
• My talk on Data Liberation at Ignite Sydney (2012)
• Vivek Kundra and some lessons learnt about tech in gov (2012)
• Internet, government and society: reframing #ozlog & #openinternet (2012)
• Gov 2.0: Where to begin – Part 1 of 3 (2009)

But last October (2011) I decided I really wanted to take the next step and expand my experience to better understand the public service, how policy goes from (and to) the political sphere from the administrative arm of government, how policy is implemented in practise and the impact/engagement with the general public.

I sat back and considered where I would ideally like to work if I could choose. I wanted to get an insight to different departments and public sector cultures across the whole govenrment. I wanted to work in tech policy, and open government stuff if at all possible. I wanted to be in a position where I might be able to make a difference, and where I could look at government in a holistic way. I think a whole of government approach is vital to serving the public in a coherent and consistent way, as is serious public engagement and transparency.

So I came up with my top three places to work that would satisfy this criteria. My top option happened to have a job going which I applied for and by November I was informed I was their first choice. This was remarkable and I was very excited to get started, but also wanted to tie up a few things in Kate’s office. So we arranged a starting date of January 31st 2012.

What is the job you ask? You’ll have to wait till the end of the post

Unfortunately for me, because I was already 6 months into a Top Secret Positive Vetting (TSPV) process (what you need for a Ministerial office in order to work with any classified information), and that process had to be completed, even though I needed a lower level for the new job. I was informed back in October that it should be done by Christmas.

So I blogged on my last day with Kate about what I had learned and indicated that I was entering the public service to get a better understanding of the administrative arm of government. There was some amusing speculation, and it has probably been the worst kept secret around Canberra for the last year

Of course, I thought I would be able to update my “Moving On” blog post within a few weeks or so. It ended up taking another 10 months for my clearance to finalise. TSPV does take a while, and I’m a little more complicated a case than the average bear given my travel and online profile

As it turns out, the 10 months presented some useful opportunities. During the last year I did a bunch of contracting work looking largely at tech policy, some website development, and I ended up working for the ACT Government for the last 5 months.

In the ACT Government I worked in a policy role under Mick Chisnall, the Executive Director of the ACT Government Information Office. That was a fantastic learning experience and I’d like to thank Mick for being such a great person to work with and learn from. I worked on open government policy, open data policy and projects (including the dataACT launch, and some initial work for the Canberra Digital Community Connect project), looked at tech policies around mobile, cloud, real time data, accessibility and much more. I also helped write some fascinating papers around the role of government in a digital city. Again, I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with excellent people with vision. A huge thanks to Mick Chisnall, Andrew Cappie-Wood, Pam Davoren, Christopher Norman, Kerry Webb, James Watson, Greg Tankard, Gavin Tapp and all the people I had the opportunity to work with. I learnt a lot, much of which will be useful in my new role.

It also showed me that the hype around “shared services” being supposedly terrible doesn’t quite map reality. For sure, some states have had significant challenges, but in some states it works reasonably well (nothing is perfect) and presents some pretty useful opportunities for whole of government service delivery.

Anyway, so my new job is at AGIMO as Divisional Coordinator for the Agency Services Division, working directly to John Sheridan who has long been quite an active and engaged voice in the Australian Gov 2.0 scene. I started a week and a half ago and am really enjoying it already. I think there are some great opportunities for me through this job to usefully serve the public and the broader public service. I look forward to making my mark and contributing to the pursuit of good tech in government. I’m also taking the role of Media Coordinator for AGIMO, and supporting John in his role.

I’ve met loads of brilliant people working in the public service across Australia, and I’m looking forward to learning a lot. I’m also keen to take a very collaborative approach (no surprises there), so I’m looking at ways to better enable people to work together across the APS and indeed, across all government jurisdictions in Australia. There is a lot to be gained by collaboration between the Federal, States/Territories and Local spheres of government, particularly when you can get the implementers and policy developers working together rather than just those up the stack.

So, if you are in government (any sphere) and want to talk open government, open data, tech policy, iterative policy development, public engagement, or all the things, please get in touch. I’m hoping to set up an open data working group to bring together the people in various governments doing great work across the country and I’ll be continuing to participate in the Gov 2.0 community, now from within the tent

A month ago was my birthday. As many of you know, I love surprises. So when my brother Touie told me to keep the 21st November free for my birthday present without any clues I was ecstatic.

What could it be?! A event, dinner, gig, circus, deep sea diving, lunar trip!! The options endless, as my imagination played with all the possibilities and impossibilities. It provided a few days great entertainment.

Earlier this week he rang to check I was still keeping the evening free, so I started musing again. But I’ve had a lot on, so didn’t really stop to think carefully about what it could be. It only occurred to me to check what was on in Canberra late this evening, but I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.

Touie picked me and we drove to the city. As we got close I was instructed to put my jacket over my head. We pulled up in a car park somewhere and he decided he needed to fashion a real blindfold to improve the surprise. As he started to take off his sock I yelled “hell no!”, and I fashioned a crude blindfold from some duct tape (both my father and brother are refrigeration mechanics, duct tape is always close to hand ).

The blindfold went on and I was led about 300m to a venue. Up steps, down steps, across roads, my hearing enhanced by the sudden lack of sight, cars on either side of us and then into a venue. At one point I could swear I could smell circus smells, but I think I was just being ambitious.

People around found it quite entertaining as my brother told them to not give it away. We went to buy some mechandise and the salespeople were telling me I was “going to love it”. I was ordered a small of something whilst I tried to figure out what was going on, and the merchandise turned out to be a tshirt thrust into my hands. So I’m at a gig of some sort? Wasn’t quite ready to let go of the circus idea

I was led *into* the gig, up and down stairs and when we got to our row the blindfold came off and I was faced by a musician I didn’t recognise on stage, playing random songs. Confused I moved into my seat and tried to figure it out.

The shirt!

I switched on my phone and looked at the front of the shirt.

Capital R eh? What the?

Turning the shirt over I struggled to read the text, but when I did…

“Rick Astley Australian Tour”

No. Way. No WAY. NOWAY! I laughed in my seat for 10 mins whilst the intro act was on, trying to not be overtly rude. I had been rickrolled in an EPIC fashion. By my brother. I would not live this down.

Then Rick came on, and I have to say, in spite of myself, it was actually a hilarious concert. He’s a funny guy.

The crowd was full on. It’s a Wednesday night for goodness sake, and we had women (and indeed a few men) throwing themselves on the stage, giving Rick roses, getting up to sing, holding Rick Astley printouts on sticks and some people even brought out their cassettes and vinyl, holding them up whilst singing every word. It was…. intense.

They didn’t play *the* song till last thing in the night, but some of the new songs were actually quite good, he did some excellent covers of motown and old songs, and the biggest moment of cognitive dissonance was Rick Astley, on the drums, playing and singing “Highway to Hell”. Seriously. The sound quality on my phone left a lot to be desired so check this out instead. Prepare for your own cognitive dissonance

And I still am stunned by the fact I have now been to *AND ENJOYED* a Rick Astley concert. What on earth is going on.

One of his new songs, Superman, wasn’t half bad either.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently around what constitutes legitimacy in government or the powers that be throughout time. It has been quite fascinating to consider what people expect, what they get, and what holds it all together.

Basically, I content that legitimacy isn’t binary but rather a spectrum. Legitimacy isn’t static, but rather something that has to be continually established, something that needs to be earnt. Gone are the days where the sword or gun ruled, because people’s fear of force has (at least in some countries) been outweighed by a sense of self-empowerment and people expecting to have a say. In democracies around the world, this say, this legitimacy, has for many years been established at the ballot box. But the Internet has changed things and legitimacy now requires so much more.

Governments today face enormous challenges to how they’ve always done things due to the democratisation (mass distribution) of communications, publishing, monitoring and indeed enforcement. We are seeing a) individuals can hold governments to account much easier and louder than in times past, b) governments finding it hard to transition to the conversational and collaborative approach expected online, and c) the role of the media, particularly in mainstream publishing has become more and more politicised making it harder for people to hear an apolitical mainstream voice from which to make up their own mind.

Legitimacy is a tricky thing in a time when anyone can say anything, when the media often reports all perspectives as if they were of equal relevance/truth, and the voice of government is just another voice in the cacophony of the Internet. In announcing a policy, a vacuum of information is created. If that vacuum isn’t filled with updates, the policy status, what it means and active engagement with “the people”, then the policy might succeed on paper, but completely fail from a public perspective if the vacuum is filled with an alternative narrative.

Legitimacy used to be enforced, now it has to be earned, every day. Nowadays, particularly in democratic countries,  without legitimacy it is very hard to maintain power.

It’s also worth considering that we (in Australia) expect a *lot* more from our government now than anyone would have dreamed 300 years ago. Health, public transport, free education for our kids, etc. We also have much higher obligations but can (often) rationalise that with the benefits.

So where does legitimacy break down, and is it possible to predict when a social system will break down and transform?

I’ve come up with two simple tensions that perhaps play a part in the ongoing legitimacy of an entity in power that hopefully reflect how societies relate to and judge legitimacy. I think this formula works both for the times of Hobbes and for now. Regardless of the fact that expectations of many modern societies has changed fundamentally from those times as we are more globally aware, connected and empowered than ever before.

Both of these tensions can be analysed at an individual, community and nation/society level, and fundamentally, whilst ever the vast majority of people in the society are not getting a negative result from these criteria, the power and structures will not be seriously challenged or threatened.

The first tension is the benefits versus the obligations *and* inconveniences. Benefits include things such as health care, security, or education. Obligations are things such as taxes or abiding by the law. Inconveniences are things like being threatened if you don’t vote a particular way, or being sent to gaol. If the benefits you receive outweigh the obligations+inconveniences, there is a positive result, if they are roughly comparative, a neutral result, or if obligations+inconveniences outweigh benefits, a negative result.

Secondly is relationship between the the perceived reality of the ruling power and the expectations of the ruling power. For instance, some people may not see it as the role of the government to enforce a moral standard, so if the government does something they perceive as conflicting with this expectation, then that can be a problem. If perceived reality is not in line with the expectations its a negative result, is roughly equal then neutral. This depends heavily on the success criteria communicated by the ruling power and the related perceived success of that ruling power. For instance, if the ruling power sets a low bar (or a reasonable bar) and is seen to overachieve, that is a positive result, seeing to have achieved what was laid down is a neutral result, and underachieving, even if the bar was set too ambitiously high, is a negative result.

Put more simply:

Test 1: benefits minus obligations+inconveniences
Test 2: public expectations (success criteria) minus perceived reality (success)

Both tests demonstrate the importance of good clear communications and engagement with the public.

Interestingly, in my opinion there has been a growing discontent on both tests in Australia. Although we have high benefits and high obligations, the inconveniences haven’t really been seen as that onerous for most people. But we are seeing an interesting scope creep with policies relating to the Internet and intelligence agencies starting to create more inconvenience to the population. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the coming years, as it appears more and more of the population are starting to feel a rise in our obligations and inconveniences.

Interesting times. In the Chinese sense Would love to hear your thoughts.

To see someone I care about dealing with Leukaemia (CLL) and putting all the theory and philosophy of martial arts into practise to not only cope, but to grow and evolve through such an experience is humbling, inspiring and deeply profound. I highly recommend people read his blog. For those of you who struggle with the topic of death, it will challenge you. But for everyone, it will likely inspire you to live better. It will inspire you to find gifts in important places, and teach you how to change your perspective if your current perspective doesn’t give you the tools you need to live well.

I still remember a series of discussions with Peter from many years ago now about martial theory, and about seeing everything as a gift. We had been talking about seeing an attack as a gift. Rather than seeing combat as something negative, or violent, or aggressive, seeing it as just another thing that you can engage in with joy. How treating all challenges of any sort as a gift changes your frame of thinking, giving you more options to affect a more awesome and holistic outcome for all involved. Little did I realise how useful this discussion would become.

Yesterday Peter showed me how to take a branch of wood and turn it into my new martial arts weapon. Hurrah! It involved breathing, learning to feel what the wood wanted to do, putting down anything negative to ensure each action of planning was smooth and uninterrupted. Basically everytime I got frustrated or agitated, including when just talking about life, I would make a mistake. It turns out planing a piece of wood is the best type of litmus test for calmness and mindfulness :) A few hours in  and I was extremely relaxed, extremely productive and even managed to complete it (apart from sanding and finishing bits).

Thank you for the meditation lesson Peter, I accept this gift, and am a better person for it. You continue to create an amazing legacy of things, people, perspectives and inspiration.

Note for others: I did a talk about the idea of applying martial arts to everyday life that covers this idea last year for those interested.

Hello

I’m here to speak to you about the legend of data liberation. It’s an important story, it’s a story about society, about people, about geeks, and it’s a story about government. Of course I am not here representing any of the government people that I work for here tonight.

So I do think I believe I represent a new generation of public servant that will transform things, but by the by.

Most people when they think of government think of garbage. They think about what is it this entity does for us? They take out our garbage, they build our roads, they build our education. But what’s happening is that the Internet is leading us to a period of discontentment. People are more empowered than we’ve ever been before and we’re seeing government make mistakes, like the NSW Transport issue (2011 issue mentioned by earlier speaker) and we’re just going “come on! We can do this better”.

So what’s starting to happen is people want the data, we’re seeing a new thing called Gov 2.0 (I know, “2.0″ is stupid) but it’s around transparency, participation and citizen-based approach to government. I’m going to run through these three things very quickly.

Transparency in the first instance is about raw data. You need access to the raw materials to make new and interesting things. It’s one thing to have someone say to you “the water is rising” but it’s another thing to actually have information over the last 200 years about how much it’s rising and be able to do your own analysis.

Having access to the raw data means we can better trust the outcomes. I mean how would it be if we got the outcome of elections, but didn’t have the capacity to have scrutineers and have people look at the raw information. We need raw data to be able to trust outcomes and to be able to provide our own analysis.

Analysis is a really important part when we get access to raw data. We need access to economic data, environmental data, biological data, demographic, government. The Human Genome project, who has heard of that? Come on, I met the guy who runs that project very recently, I also got to meet Hans Rosling, was very cool.

Another type of transparency is parliamentary transparency. So the Italian Government has this huge glass room to let the sun shine in. Cool idea. then they covered it up. Not so cool.

Really good metaphor for the fact though that people want access to the information so that they can participate in the democracy, they can participate in the policy, they can participate in the process. If people aren’t able to get information, then they aren’t able to get educated, then they aren’t able to get an informed view, then they aren’t able to participate effectively.

So basically where we’re going is a period of time where how government operates is it actually starts to co-develop the policy with the people. Because you know there are a lot of skills out there, there’s a lot of us that know stuff that can contribute to making government do things better. So why wouldn’t they talk to us?

Well, it’s not because they’re bad or evil or nefarious, generally speaking, it’s usually just because it’s not the way things are done. Things are starting to be done differently now.

Open data and raw data also gives us new opportunities to innovation. I actually ran a thing called GovHack which was really awesome. Raw data, competition, people making heaps of projects over 48 hours.

You also have the opportunity to crowdsource. So this was the spike when the floods hit Queensland of the number of people who liked the Queensland Police Facebook page. And what the police found, and this is fascinating, was that not only were they able to get information out, but people were able to get information to the police. Because of course they took over trying to coordinate emergency responses.

So when people were able to take “oh, 10 people have said this bridge has gone down”, well that gives you a fairly good indication how to deploy your resources so crowdsourcing gives a new type of raw data that can help government do things better and help people work with government better.

So: iterative, collaborate government. That’s what Gov 2.0 is about. Transparency, Participation and a Citizen Focus in how we do things.

The Government of the future is something we have to do collaboratively. If we can’t create the blueprint for the future as a whole society then we’re going to end up running into troubles and we do run into troubles. We can’t respond in a quick manner, we can’t respond in an effective manner. And then we end up just becoming – government itself – ends up becoming out of date, irrelevant, and not able to respond to the changing needs of society and of it’s citizens.

So basically, we need to change or we’re gonna die. Woo.

A couple of things in Australia. There’s a bunch of raw data things happening. There’s dataACT which I’m actually working on which is the first actual open data platform. It does transcoding, it does APIs, it does all the cool technical stuff. data.gov.au and dataVIC and some of the other ones are mostly just content management systems but they’re starting to change and this weekend I think is a hackfest on the NSW transport data as well.

A couple of considerations, people thing about privacy but people don’t think about fish privacy. If you release the data about all the flora and fauna above the ocean, and then someone  goes in and fishes a particular fish to extinction, then what does that mean about privacy.

Geek culture and tech skills give us the capacity for privacy, for analysis, for doing all the cool stuff that leads to education and empowerment which leads to digital democracy.

And frankly, everyone here sees themselves as a geek right? Those who don’t should because geeks are the future.

So, thank you for coming with me on my little journey on data liberation. I will continue to fight the war and please, come with me, embrace your geek if you haven’t yet already, free the data and let’s get a better society together.

Thank you very much.

Privacy Panel

I sat on the IGF privacy panel as an open government person, and it was a fascinating discussion. Other panelist

You can watch the Privacy Panel video on the auIGF website, but you (quite ironically) have to provide your name and email address. If you just want to get the gist of the panel, check out the IGF session captions. I’ve copied the caption service transcript at the end of this post for my archives. They did a really good job on the day, but we all spoke quite fast, so it’ll give you a good but rough idea of what was said.

Government and Internet Policy session

My personal goal in this space is to have a more nuanced public dialogue on Internet policy such that we make more informed, collaborative and inclusive debate on where we as a society, want from the Internet, and such that we can avoid government policies having unintended results that inhibit the social or economic opportunities we have enjoyed to date.

I thought it would be interesting to get some of our Internet policy and practise luminaries to discuss Internet policy. It was a robust and fascinating discussion resulting in some great insights and ideas. Core ideas that came out where a) the Internet cannot be defined because the moment you do so, the technology changes, but b) there are some core values/principles that underpin the Internet that could be used to assess policy. It was interesting to have some, at times, quite contrary thoughts in the room, but to see that by the end of the session, the different perspectives were largely two sides of the same coin.

What I rapidly realised during the session was that most people in this space are focused on a very narrowly defined patch, and each patch is being dealt with largely in isolation from the rest. For example, the idea that “we don’t need to worry about policies that deal with content (such as Internet filtering) because we are focused on the domain name space”. In my opinion this is somewhat problematic because it makes it too easy to play divide and conquer by policy.

As a result of this session I’m writing a short paper on some core values of the Internet that migh be a good basis for reviewing government policies around the world so we can start to reframe Internet policy in terms of what is good for society, rather than the relatively unhelpful and specialised “open vs closed Internet” debate we have seen completely fill the airwaves recently. I’m going to do some policy analysis on some of the big ones against this list of values to see how the model stacks up.

Check out the wiki page where we captured the ideas contributed to this session.

As part of setting up the wikipage for this session, I also invited other sessions to use the wiki. Two other sessions decided to use the wiki and you can check them out at http://auigf.wikispaces.com/

Below are the outcomes of the session, and below that all the content that led us to this outcome.

Values of the Internet

Potential list of values, perhaps “public good” aspects we take for granted, things “on the net”? Perhaps government should be able to confirm they agree with? Perhaps “please make a commitment”. Perhaps the values could be then compared and contrasted with policy positions:

• Coordination not control- committing to protecting coordination efforts and commitment to participate in coordination:
  • Social: more collaborative approach which might lead to more citizen centric policy.
  • Economic: capacity to tap into other efforts, more effective policy outcomes that align with how the Internet is actually run/managed/governed.
• Interoperability- open standards, no undisclosed/forced gated communities
  • Social: avoids lock in or out, people can make informed decisions, increased usability, accessibility,
  • Economic: fair market competition,
• Peer to peer global connectivity- people/devices/all ports/all teh things/any to any – connecting directly to each other
  • Social: free expression, non discriminatory
  • Economic: freedom to provide and accept and service, facilitates innovation, we don’t know what the next killer protocol is going to be, so freedom for future opportnuities,
• Route around damage- capacity to deal with issues
  • Social: gete around censorship,
  • Economic: resilience, high availability, availability during natural disasters,
• Distributed control- no single point of failure or control, eg multi-source networks of trust
  • Social: uncapturable, ability for civil disobedience and dissent,
  • Economic: no single point of failure, avoiding damage of monopoly rents
• Non-discriminatory approach- users, devices, content, jurisdiction, technology neutral/common access, free flowing data
  • Social: affordability, accessibility, availability
  • Economic: free market

Perhaps some point about public information, gov role in providing public infrastructure/information/emergency information/open data (bushfires)? Maybe this is more a policy recommendation than a core value?

Additional comments and points:

Internet must have the capacity to deliver:
All ports, protocols, content, origins and all destinations.

What is the different between the Internet and public roads?
NBN as a policy example where there is a a purposefully neutral policy approach.
Technology doesn’t limit the application. Public communications. Will a private market service the need and if not, then public investment. What are the parameters for determining a market factor. Is it accessible for everybody? Eg comparison with electricity grid.
Consistent addressing structure
Consistent naming structure
Availability, predictability, stability
Government needs to commit to an Internet that is coordinated and not controlled.

Below is the rest of the content of the wiki from my session (for my archive, from the date of this post):

Session Info

Facilitated by Pia Waugh, this workshop looked at the role of governments in Internet management, policy development and regulation. Participants were invited to exchange views on the pressures and issues that could drive governments to take an increased regulatory role, the areas in which meaningful government engagement would be of benefit, and the areas where the open and multi-stakeholder model should be retained. Topics included current parliamentary deliberations on reforming national security legislation and the potential impact on business and end-user rights.

Session Methodology

We kicked off the session by, as a group, trying to identify the high level categories of problem spaces that the plethora of Internet related policies, legislation, codes and trade agreements are trying to deal with. As part of this we had a first shot at identifying the various mechanisms these approaches adopt in trying to achieve their goals.

Then we dived into a discussion about the technical characteristics of the Internet and their social/economic implications. That discussion had some healthy debate that resulting in some consensus that the technical characteristics of the Internet are constantly changing and shouldn’t be pinned down. However, that there *are* some overriding principles/values that underpin the Internet as it was, is, and should continue to be.

We ran out of time to compare and contrast our key categories and the various mechanisms of enforcement, with the model of how we define the characteristics of the Internet. Hopefully this can be part of an ongoing discussion in this community.
The outcome of the session is captured in this wiki, which forms the basis of a paper that can be fine tuned over the coming month in the lead up to the International IGF meeting in Baku and is a part of the Australian contribution to the international discussions.

Where people identify specific tangible policy recommendations for the Australian Government, please add them below. Feel free to copy and paste from existing working this space so long as you give attribution. This will be presented to the Australian Government along with a copy of the paper above.

Policy & Legislation

Please contribute to the Internet related policy/legislation page as this list is far too long to be on this page. From this rather extensive list of policies, legislation, codes and even trade agreements, we can see a number of categories of problem spaces emerging:

Summary of Issue Categories

Policies tend to have one or a number of theme categories inherent (please add/modify this list as it’ll be basis of discussion):

• Individual interests
  • personal safety (eg cyberbullying)
  • market meeting the needs of the community public vs private?
  • privacy
  • identity astroturfing
  • free expression (and thought, limiting behaviour on the internet?)
    • illegal vs inappropriate behaviour
  • rights? access, usability,
  • consumer safeguards role of gov? market distortion questions?
  • net neutrality
• National interests
  • skills
  • economic growth
  • national/economic security (eg cyberwarfare)
  • sovereignty
  • knowledge
  • trust and confidence – transactional confidence as well as who
• Culture & democracy
  • shifting cultural norms can and often respond to shifting cultural norms
  • social inclusion languages, accessibility, access, (need definition)
  • use of the internet in democracy evoting, astroturfing
• Market challenges
  • intellectual property (copyright for copyright sake? international sake, software patents, trademarks domain name policy)
  • creative/digital industries in Australia
  • innovation (?)
  • competition
• Legal challenges
  • prejudice and justice on trial proceedings
  • local jurisdiction vs international scope of the Internet difficulty of local enforcement on an international thing, some people chosing selectively the jurisdictional that suits their purposes

It was suggested the above ideas might boil down to the two categories of Ownership and Accountability. Thoughts?

Summary of Implementation Mechanisms

The tools and mechanisms used in policies range from (please add/modify this list as it’ll be basis of discussion):

Government Mechanisms

• Social
  • Education/marketing of an idea of information
  • Civil remedies
• Legal
  • Judicial oversight as requirement for legal enforcement mechanisms?
  • Tweaking of criminal acts (personal and corporate)
  • Media law
  • Injunctive takedown orders, suppressions,
  • Contract law
• Regulation & industry
  • Content regulation
  • Industry regulation imposed, co-regulation (relegatory framework designed to be administered by industry framework) or self/community regulated
  • Codes of conduct
  • Private arrangements eg changes to services, filtering
  • Standards
  • International coordination needs more consideration
  • Public/private partnerships collaborating to achieve an outcomes
• Gov investment strategies
  • Taxes to accelerate or retard particular behaviours
• Technology mechanisms
  • Copyright protection
• Enforcement & Monitoring
  • What role should gov play in both/either?
  • The scope of intelligence agencies
  • Monitoring/management:
  • Monitoring is in all directions including sideways
  • Monitoring of networks, publicising/disclosing network performances
  • Forensics of online information get context on issues
  • Evaluation and analysis of policy values and metrics chosen, evidence
  • Enforcement and publicity of enforcement related to the capacity for an enforcement agency to do its job it directly related to its visibility

Citizen mechanisms
The tools and mechanisms used by citizens to protect themselves (please add/modify this list as it’ll be basis of discussion):

• Countermeasures how easy it is to work around the enforcement, race to the bottom
• FOI

Further Policy Recommendations for Australia

Any specific Australian Government policy recommendations you have for the Australian Government, please feel free to link to existing papers, but pragmatic and tangible policy suggestions would be much appreciated.

• Have official Australian Government participation and active voice in international Internet policy, representing the best interests of Australians

7) Further Contributions Post Session

Canberra Manifesto (contributed by Bret Treasure after the event)

The Internet is our most powerful communication, business and innovation tool. Although it is disruptive and although it may challenge individual governments, institutions, industries and businesses, its overall benefit to the people of the world is clear. The Internet is a path to a more connected and improved society; we look to governments to plan for that future.

So we make these requests:

• That prior to legislating, Governments take into account the self-expression, community, efficiency and innovation that a decentralized collaborative regulatory structure has delivered
• That prior to legislating, governments look to existing laws
• That governments support a globally focused, multi-stakeholder, open approach to Internet regulation
• That governments foster competition in the delivery of Internet services and access
• That governments enact principles-based law rather than technology-specific law
• That governments facilitate inclusion and accessibility
• That governments respect such fundamental human rights as privacy and freedom of expression
• That governments address the challenging issues that arise without using them as political tools.

auIGF Privacy Panel Transcript

auIGF 11 October 2012 Session time 2:30pm-3:30pm

[Welcome to Red Bee Media Australia's Live Remote Captioning Service.]

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: In order to watch it. I think it’s those kinds of copyright restrictions on access to content – it seems cruel to me in an age of digital abundance we have these types of issues for the visually impaired and me as a consumer, if I want to read a book on my iPad, I got a voucher, eBook, which is the only format it’s compatible is kindle fire. These are the digital restrictions, the types attached.
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I think a lot of us would continue to continue the discussion, but we are eating into the AGM times, the next panel – thank you to all of our panellists and for your questions and contributions. Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
CHAIR: Can I ask the next panel to come up and those that are staying to stay. If this panel could move t next could come up. We will get going straight away.
The most vehement about openness are the ones who want the strictest rules about privacy, which strikes me as being slightly odd.
For what it’s worth, I’m happy to pay for content. I think I should be allowed to choose the content I watch, rather than have Channel 9 or 10 or 7 decide what they want to import from the UK.
We will do a quick panel switch and move to privacy. Let me read you what we said about privacy. We wrote this three months ago: things have moved on a bit since then. As with the copyright debate, the massive social and commercial changes brought about by the growth of the Internet over the last decade are also forcing law-makers… (reading .).
So they said a lot’s happened in the last three months since I wrote that and we can probably start and finish this discussion with three words – mandatory, data retention. The changes to national security legislation currently delivered by the joint parliamentary committee on changes are a hot topic when it comes to privacy, evidenced by the in excess of 200 submissions. We will come back to it later on.

Firstly, I want to set the scene folks, more broadly. What is privacy today? Does it mean the same things as it means to an 18- year-old? I said I was talking with curt and I said earlier on, for me it’s privacy I want to be able to tell you you’re allowed to know nothing about me. For the Facebook generation, privacy is, I want to publish everything about myself where ever I want to but you’re not allowed to do anything with that information. Those are two fundamentally opposed views. Let’s talk about that with the panel. I will briefly run down the introductions. Curt Wimmer you met, he was here. And Cheryl Landon is the director of auDA, and is the former Chair of the ICAANN advisory committee thing.
This is Craig Ng, General Crown sil for APNIC. This is Roger Clarke, the Chair of the Australian Privacy foundation. This is Pia Waugh, Open Government advocate, former ICT policy adviser to Senator Kate Lundy.
And… Adam is not here. Your name is not on my list.
ADAM.. I am here.
CHAIR: Never mind. I was going to do a pirate thing, but I won’t. It wouldn’t be fair. Okay. What do we mean by privacy?
What do we mean by privacy, Cheryl?
CHERYL: everything I will say in no way reflects upon or is to be seen as the views of any of the organisations that I represent.
I’m a member of or have been a director prior or currently to.

Future I will reserve my judgement on. I think privacy is a dream. I think we lost it. I think privacy was something that may all want to and perhaps in a glazed-eyed moment dream that we could have again, but we walk around with these things, w are geo locating ourselves. We have huge amounts of data collected and we do so willingly. So to say that we have a level of privacy, I think, is a pipe dream. What I do have, however, and we can get back to that later, Chris, is very firm views on what happens with it.

CHRIS: good excellent. Craig, you’re a Facebook junkie, you put anything up on Facebook, given the chance. What do you think? CRAIG: That’s true. I think that the Privacy Act in Australia is a misnomer. For us to be comforted by the fact there is a Privacy Act, to think we are protected, our privacy is protected is totally wrong, because our Privacy Act is so limited in its scope that the traditional concept of privacy to people on the street, you know, privacy not to be photographed; you know privacy not to be put up on Facebook and for your picture to appear and tagged immediately, there is no protection against it. So, you know, and I’ll be interested to talk about privacy act in a moment, but our Privacy Act protects us from such a minute scope, that it’s virtually ineffective.

CHRIS: curt, from an American perspective?
KURT: We don’t even have a privacy act. We entirely react. To specific problems. I think privacy is an agreement. It depends upon, you know, what you can work out with whoever you are giving up voluntarily your privacy to and whatever pledges and promises that are made or basically that we enforce through the act, I think.
CHRIS: Okay, Pia?

PIA: all right. Basically, privacy is whatever an individual perceives it to be. The problem is that of course that depends on your technical literacy. With a relatively technical ill literate population, you have no privacy. People want to protect themselves as much as as little as they want but because the IT skills have gone so down, those people are not aware of what privacy they have. A lot of people don’t think about environmental policy. There was a case study where data was published that looked at floa and fauna in the northern seas of Australia and in a couple of weeks a particular species of fish was almost done to extinction. I think there’s a huge amount of optimism that I have, which is…

CHRIS: can you slow down a little bit… These guys are really good, but…
PIA: Sorry, weirdly enough, it’s ten timings as fast in my head. I will try.

CHRIS: I have to stop you – I have the concept on fish privacy, which I think we could spend hours discussing!

(LAUGHTER) PIA: Environmental privacy is what people don’t think about. And there is the panoptic of things going on about the state of being able to see into the lives of the people, one of the cool things is the people can see back into the lives of the state. That’s interesting, though I think there is a lot less privacy than there was simply because there is the capacity to get to data, it creates possibilities for better democracy as well. The final point I will make is that there is a disturbing trend towards looking at inappropriate behaviour as opposed to illegal behaviour. The enormous amount of data available from people who are not technically literate enough to turn it off means that there is a whole judgement call going on inappropriate behaviour, rather than illegal and I’m concerned about that.

CHRIS: Adam?

ADAM: The cyber punk manifesto says that privacy is the right to selectively reveal oneself to the world. It is about saying this is a piece of information about me and this is the audience in which I give authorisation to view that piece of information.

There are lots of talk of the young generation these days putting all this information on Facebook and how they are giving up their privacy and they don’t care and it’s fine. They do care. They care quite a lot. We know that, because when things like Facebook’s timeline update came to and people in France realised there was a discrepancy between the intended audience of some messages that were posted on people’s walls, or in their inboxes, it’s not 100% clear if that was a bug replicating that information. There was certainly people who said that message was private. Now it’s public. That’s not okay. There are heaps of examples of people actually saying there is no way that would have been intended for a public audience, like a young woman who called up Triple J and said: “I wrote a dirty poem to my boyfriend”. His parents were able to read it because it was on her wall. The assumption that we are giving up our rights and saying we don’t care about it is false and we do care.

CHRIS: I’m sure you do, I agree. Roger.

ROGER: where to start. A privacy is the interest individuals have in a private space. We have a fair bit of con sis ten – - consistency. That’s abstract. The only people who are interested in that kind of abstract rubbish are people like me who publish articles on it. Privacy is a specific gut feeling every individual has and each individual has it differently at different times. It is utterly situational and utterly personal. If we have a list running down the screen of a privacy breaches reported in Australia this week, there would be enormous diversity and we would react differently to the examples as they came across the screen. That is how it is. And yes, it would be nice if we could divide it up and tackle just some of the things, the Privacy Foundation is so stretched across that great list. That’s not the reality. Now, the critical thing that you’ve been raising, the assumption that’s built into the wording we were given, has to do with the “privacy is dead” proposition. It’s not dead because people demand it. They don’t walk in the streets saying: “We want a real Privacy Act instead of this rubbish semi-data protection act”. They don’t do that kind of thing. It’s the abstract. People are only interested in the spefpbg. — specific. They will walk against an Australia card and against an access card and they will walk against data protection and a range of specific things. People demand it. Privacy ain’t dead. Privacy pauses in between flurries. One thing I that will hammer, but I won’t give you the explanation because I will get more air time later, won’t I Chris? (LAUGHTER)

The igeneration, the digital natives, that lot, I call them the igeneration for obvious reasons because “i” stands for everything in this conference, the igeneration will be more privacy sensitive than previous generations. I will explain when I get the chance.

PIA: I want to make a comment. I always find it funny, a lot of my peers didn’t get computers until they were in late High School or university. I had a computer since I was four because my mum was a geek. Now when I was a kid there was an active campaign called “stranger danger”. It taught you all the basics and so when I was on, you know, when I was dialling into remote servers and having chats with people in the mid-90s and running up huge STD phone bills for my school, I, you know, you applied those principles t principles applied directly. One of the myths we face is that online privacy is somehow a completely different thing from meet space. I never call it in real life, because I believe online is real life as well, but meet space privacy is not that different. I think part of the problem we have is that we’re trying to treat it like something different, whereas the basics of stranger danger and tech literacy, chose things combined give us the tools to maintain our personal level of privacy to our satisfaction.

CRAIG: A small point. I think privacy is something that moves with time as well, just like copyright. I think it’s a balance. It’s a balance between society that wants to protect privacy verses safety. So you know, those of you in Australia would be familiar with the case of Jill Meagher who recently passed away. CCTV suddenly is acceptable and encouraged and well, I haven’t heard a lot of…

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I will disagree.

CHRIS: on CCTV – in the UK, where I’m from, it is almost universally loved. Everyone thinks it is fantastic, not everybody, but general people, society, thinks it is great. And it is in fact supported and promoted by all of the great British detective modern detective programs who, which refer constantly to the fact that almost every crime is solved due to CCTV.

CHERYL: What are the statistics on the crime solution, it’s infinitesimally small.

CHRIS: I’m not suggesting being a fan of it, but it can be embraced. In Melbourne it is happening now because of an individual event. You said you violently disagree. Go ahead and violently disagree.

CRAIG: I didn’t say violently. The statistic that was out after the case was that in the UK one in 1,000 cases are solved with the aid of CCTV, and another report that was put out said that the amount of money that gets poured into CCTV could be better spent putting in street lights.

CHRIS: I agree. Still loved though.

PIA: Sorry, I saw a brilliant speech by, can I can’t remember his name, I will remember it, but about the difference between security theatre and security reality. This is part of the problem. There is a lot of theatre going on. The talk is on the Linux website from a couple of years ago. But the, but I think this is a big issue. And data logging is a really good example of theatre verses reality as well. So we will get to that one.

CHRIS: do we have CCTV in the states publicly?

CURT KLS: NOT TO THE EXTEND AS IN — NOT TO THE EXTEPBLT AS IN THE STATES.

CHRIS: do you want to say something, Josh? We will get on to data retention. I know you want to talk about it. Yes, Josh?

JOSH: With regards to the CCTV stats on solving crimes, one may have to ask: does the presence of CCTV prevent or prevent crimes happening in the first place?

I don’t know.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Initially there is a lull when people see that there is an increase in surveillance of them. But they get used to it. And that deterrent fades a away and then it gets used for tracking people.

CHRIS: I will get to you.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: More fine-grained than that. Crimes of passion are uninfluenced. Crimes are maybe briefly deterred, but there are still thieves who do it in front and get photographs taken of them. Mostly it is displaced, almost all of the effect of CCTV that’s been measured in the States is dace placement of behaviour.

CHRIS: you’re all talking about facts.

(LAUGHTER)

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: We’re not talking about data retention.

CHRIS: it makes people feel better.

Paul Evans, you had something in I have a remote comment from Tom.

PAUL: I want to smile for the camera. Hi.

(LAUGHTER)

20 years ago, Roger, you and I were implemented the Privacy Act. Do you agree with Craig that it is almost a piece of relic-try? Do we need to revive it?

CRAIG: The privacy act is distinct from the amendments and was worth having. It’s since been cut away by a myriad of slashes. Obviously every successive act overrides it in many respects. It’s never been adapted to take account of technological change. There’s been many end runs and every loophole has been used and many loopholes have been found that weren’t designed in the first place. It’s become poor. Fit was enforced, if it was enforceable it would help but the limited power that the Privacy Commissioner has got are not used either. I think the Privacy Foundation protects you better than the Comigtser. — Commissioner, I would say that.

CHRIS: Tom, do you have a remote thing?

TOM.. Yes, this is from ‘Dude D’. He says: “If privacy is a dream, why do you have curtains?”

(LAUGHTER)

CHERYL: I’m happy to respond to that. Chris knows I’m happy to respond to that because I’ve given up my right to privacy. There is not a single curtain in house. There are not doors in my house.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: She lives on top of a mountain.

CHERYL: there are also no neighbours. We’re all wearing curtains right now. I can change that.

CHRIS: all right. Now, back away… Thank you.

All right.

So there’s a wander through the joys of what privacy means or may mean or may not mean.

(Pause). There’s obviously a balance required, right? Between privacy and, let’s just call it security. We could argue about the term. Let’s call it security. We will get on in a minute to data retention. There’s a balance required between security and privacy, some of our information has to be available. How do we, what’s the perfect, is there a way of striking that balance? Who should decide? How should we decide? Yo go ahead. You waved at me.

Slowly.

PIA: I will articulate madly, will do that to slow myself down. You see, it’s funny. I see the balance as not necessarily between – there is a balance between security and privacy, but the balance between openness and privacy is challenging. I think the only way to strike that balance is firstly to not assume that any one group or any group in isolation can make that decision, there needs to be an ongoing dialogue and debate in the society and community and done in a transparent way and it needs to be done in an iterative way. One of the things I’ve thought about and I’ve started to look at ways, have started doing projects to implement is looking at policy from an iterative approach – how can we have, dare I say it, an agile approach to policy development, where rather than the policy developers in isolation with a smaller group of stakeholders, you have open policy development and then in the first instance, so you get more peer review, more transparency and then upon implementation, it’s constantly being monitored, to use the term, and reviewed and recommendations made and fed back to the policy. It’s only through having that ongoing approach to policy can government policy maintain flexibility and be able to respond quickly to new challengers and opportunities. So in a way our entire approach to policy needs to fundamentally shift to answer that specific question. In the question about managing the balance between openness and privacy, the part of that debate ends up being, well, you know, we need to have a certain amount of low, you know, you can’t goo too high res into a lot of data stats because it is very easy, with age location to identify 80 per cent of people from a data set, so you need to make sure it’s low grain enough to protect privacy, but high grain enough to still get policy outcomes, research outcomes, transparency, and to help the society and the different aspects of that society make well-informed decisions.

CHRIS: I have Cheryl and Roger. But I want to check in with Kurt. You said a little while ago you tended to be over reactive in the States. A lot of, it’s hard to go back, once you’ve taken a step forward with legislation.

P9/11 example is a good one.

KURT: There is a balance between privacy and security, but that is your right of privacy as against the state. There is another balance that’s sort of a balance between privacy and maybe free content, which might be your balance as against commercial operators. You know what, as to the first balance, I think you are right. I think once you sort of change that calculus, you never get it back. September 11 I think did that to us as a society, and it’s very hard to get it back. We have the Patriot Act passed in moments after September 11.

CHRIS: Sounds like a demine act that says you should be patriotic to America.

KURT.. We’re great at acronyms.

CHERYL: I read a — made a couple of notes. One thing I want to come back to were Pia’s words that there shouldn’t be this big difference between the digital world and the cloud, our second lives and thirds verses the hard copy one that we’re all used to and historically perhaps have our benchmarks from. But when we make a choice on privacy or what I’m going to expose or not expose to whatever audience in the, inverted commas “non-digital” and, therefore, some people believe “real world”. There are those of us who think that is the opposite. I’m making an informed choice. I decide as suggested whether I put up curtains or not; whether I walk down the street with my credit card number printed on my T-shirt or not. These are things that I would decide I should or should not do. So I know what I’m doing. And who has access to the material I’m exposing or allowing to be collected. So what I would like to also bring into the table for the panel is how we ensure that the individual or perhaps small community or group or state knows what information is connected – is assured of the accuracy of that information. You know what, typos happen; wrong bits get connected to the wrong name. Do we have ability to redress and repeal and write these errors when they occur? It’s basically what’s been used, how it’s being used, why it is being used and that you know about it. It’s informed consent and control.

CHRIS: can I will go to Roger and then I have a comment from over here and then there.

ROGER: Pia joined my board and may be following me as chair. Everything she said a few more things as well. Privacy protection is the process of achieving balance among multiple constituents. It is the APF works with. There is no privacy absolutism, that is nonsense. What is the balance among? Among interests of the individual themselves, you have to trade off multiples. Interests of the group, interests of community, of society, and unfortunately, terribly powerfully, interest of corporations. There is all sorts of balances that have to be done. A further factor is that the four dimensions of privacy I’ve always used are the weakness of the so- called Privacy Act. It’s only a data protection act. The other three are behavioural privacy, privacy of individual communications, and privacy of the physical person. When you go on television on the news straight after the announcement that $3 million of CCTV cameras are going to be strewn across Melbourne because Jill Meagher’s been murdered, you have to think through very carefully the balances. Physical privacy is sufficient that such that about the worst invasion of privacy you can suffer is to be killed, about the second worse is to suffer serious violence to yourself. They are all part of privacy. There’s many different balances. How do we do it? There’s a small set of principles which government agencies, legislators and corporations try hard to avoid. If they would work on these principles x we would get somewhere. The first is justification. Why are you doing this? How is this going to work, what is the problem you’re trying to solve and what is the mechanism whereby the change will occur? It is proportion natural, taking into account the side effects it will have? Is it transparent? Do we have the information to work with, or are you hiding things from us? Are there controls in place, which includes mitigating measures in order to overcome the necessary negative effects on privacy, and is there accountability? Can we clobber the people who play the game badly. If those things would be applied, if privacy impact assessments were forced on organisations, public and private sector, we would address these problems.

CHRIS: that solves the problem, we can all go home. Perfectly fine. Rob.

ROB: One of the balanced points I think is between privacy and free speech and freedom. There’s discussion about the right of the individual to choose how much of them about themselves will be revealed. But three comments made in private comments in recent weeks I think illustrate that there is more than just the choice involved. Mitt Romney and his 47% comment made at a private dinner, Alan Jones’ comments about the Prime Minister’s father, made at possibly, possibly not, a private function. And the former Speaker’s texts clearly intended by him to remain private. Each of those things are things that do have, there is a genuine public interest. People may disagree as to what extent the public interest probably for Romney’s cases, it is clearly relevant to probably the most important election that will happen in the next four years.

CHRIS: that is unfair!

ROG — ROB: in each case there is potential public interests. The balance about not always having the right of individual to choose how much privacy is revealed is important.

CHERYL: I need to respond briefly to Rob. I think what you made is an important point. I think there are times when one knowing what one is doing, and a public person is one of these categories, they should assume that they are giving up certain likelihoods of the right to privacy. I’m not a particularly public person, but I do believe and mostly it happens, that just about everything I say, do, or otherwise, is probably going to be recorded, photographed, taken down, in many cases transcribeed into three or four languages. And and it will be searched on the Internet. Because of that, I would be incredibly stupid and I’m not, to do anything, say anything, or transmit anything that I would not have published on the front page of the following morning’s newspapers. I’m not saying it may not make interesting reading from time to time, but you do it informed. So it’s just dumb to think that if you are public, you should do that.

CHRIS: Now I understand why you often speak in headlines. I will go to this gentleman here.
PAUL: I’m retired, so can say anything I like. This is the fourth session today, and three out of the four I think had the same message that we’re all missing. And that is the education of the young. I’m not talking about High School students. I’m talking about peer, stranger danger, walked past a daycare centre and a little kid said, “Hello stranger”. I thought, there you go, he’s got the message. I didn’t speak to him. I kept going.

(LAUGHTER)

There was a camera there, I didn’t tell you.

The reference to the igeneration and I call them exactly the same is probably right. When you start out in primary school, what are you, five? Six years old, thereabouts, and half the tackers have got telephones already. So why aren’t we teaching them that this telephone is communication device which can get you in a lot of hot water. They’ve all got mum and dad’s computer to play, learning games on, and/or I’m a small bugger I can do all sorts of thing t why are we not teaching them from that age onwards that these are devices that are tools that you can use that have inherent dangers and you need to learn about them? Then you have an informed choice to be an absolute idiot on Facebook, or Twitter or any of those other devices. I, like quite a lot of people in this room, came to computers in the middle of our working careers, so that we were already suspicious of the damn things. You know, we looked at these square boxes and went, “I don’t know about that”. Like most of us, I think we all do our electronic banking and all that sort of stuff and…

CHRIS: what’s your password again?

PPAUL.. I write it on a poet-it note! We’re all fairly bleary about things like that. So we inherently have that privacy attached to us because I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, I was seen and not heard at the dinner table. Until a certain age. Whereas now the kids probably sit in the dinner table bloody texting somebody. So who knows.

CHERYL — PIA: you’re still carrying your phone around, that’s meta data.

PAUL: Mine is turned off unless the AFP has the triangles on the towers running. We need to educate the young ones, so they are the generation coming forward and they will carry the privacy, they will understand what digital rights are; they will know where to go with copyright, and all of those other ones linked together, that’s where it ought to be.

CHRIS: speaking at a young one, I’m looking forward to being educated. I’m sure that will happen.

Now, Craig wants to say something, hold on.

I’ve got this gentleman here, comments at the back. I had Narell and John, and Geoff and we are still, we still haven’t got to data retention. That is kind of my ultimate goal was that we wouldn’t get there. You want to bring data retention in? I promise we will get to data retention. Narell; you want to deal with this point before we go to data retention? Let me take that off you. Don’t worry guys, I will do it myself. You relax.

NARELL. What was it, 100 or so years ago and this funny electricity thing happened. People were terrified the kiddys would be burned and the adults, the parents, were terrified because they could see how dangerous it was. There were very real dangers. And over time we figured it out and we incorporate that into our parents practising and we rapidly teach children not to stick things in power points and occasionally we miss out the occasional kiddy. (LAUGHTER)

CHRIS: how occasion — how nicely put…

(LAUGHTER)

CRAIG: I agree with the education point, but the erosion of privacy is the function of technology. You know, once upon time when, you know, when I was a younger kid, when you receive a letter it’s private to you. You ep it, you lock it, no-one sees it. You know, today my email is hosted by Google. My, I use Chrome, and I synchronise my website together, and…

CHRIS: what’s your password again!

CRAIG: I trade convenience for having my information in the Cloud. I trust Google to some extent, but do I trust the Government not to access my data at some point? We will talk about data retention. My data is everywhere. Every time I step on a tram, my electronic Miki card tracks it. Every time I use my credit card it’s tracked. And my credit card company keeps it for more than seven years. We’re worried about two years of, you know, it’s a balance. We’re talking about what sort of data we’re talking about, but you know, I used to be a partner in a law firm and you know, record retention policies, everything is kept for seven years, so your interaction with your banks, other commercial entities, those records are kept for seven years. So it’s a bit of a balance.

CHRIS: Quickly, then we will go to data retention. Geoff you’re on.

GEOFF. I thought we lived in a society that believed in redemption. I did something wrong, I went to court and got tried by a jury of my peers, I served the time and then I was erased, I could start again. Even the jurists who tried me are not meant to have knowledge of my previous heinous misdemeanours before this particular one. Privacy is about time as much as it is about now. What we’re seeing now is the data logged is never, ever, erased. The person I was when I was 16 is not the person I am now. I’m a different person. There are things I did then that I really rather no- one would know about. Oddly enough, I it was pre-Google. You guys don’t know about it. But my children can’t do that. I think that’s really sad. I think that’s incredibly bad. I think it’s bad that we’re trying to impose standards on our children that we as children never had. I’m not sure they’re capable of doing that. I would like to understand your views. I’m not concerned about privacy. I have nothing I’m ashamed about. When you think about yourself, when you were 13, and does that still apply to you now?

CHERYL: I didn’t have nothing I’m ashamed about. Education has been pointed out and a number of our users. And when we put things out on Google, to be fair, that you know, it’s going to be there forever.
CHRIS: I’m going to go to certain people desperate to speak. I want you to please be crisp.

PIA.. We’ve had a period of tile. I will say00 years, of pretending to be something we’re not. We’ve all drunk the Machiavelli Cool Aid, we pretend we’re pristine and norm Mall. I think that is a big opportunity for us to become more mature as a society and realise that we aren’t, you know, pristine little Stepford lives and that’s a good thing. Though in the short term there will be pain and there will be pain, I think in the long- term it is good for us. That’s it.

ADAM.. One of the problems with that is that there are still regimes in the world who like to kill people. For dissenting views. And when you start saying that privacy in the West is something that we don’t really care about, that much, and we should be a little bit more open and we should be allowing a little bit more access to we can grow as a society, it’s dangerous, because we start allowing companies like Fin fisher and CISCO to build devices that get placed into Syria and end up being very damaging.

CHRIS: you end up being killed precisely because you’re not private. You say stuff you’re not…Should you be saying it? I wasn’t being literal, I was, but it doesn’t mean it’s my view. Roger?

ROGER.. I say that the identification would be more privacy sensitive. No-one — the indie case would be more privacy sensitive — the igeneration would be more privacy sensitive. Young kids are risk-takers. It’s a function of age. It becomes more risk-adverse as it gets older.

They accumulate more things to hide. They had some when they were young, but not many, they get a lot more as time goes by. The current generation habit ten much earlier and bit ten more often than our generations were bit ten. Their indiscretions, carrying on from Cheryl, we can see they’re record which yours and mine weren’t. And they’re seen by more people again later than ever was the case in the past. Guess what? Each generation each generation is becoming more savvy. We need them to teach that way around, not that way around. And each, the igeneration will, as a result, be much more sensitive…

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: This is why groups like the crypto party has been a success. After the cyber Crime Bill was passed recently, there was no party like a crypto-app install party. So someone started the hashtag and said let’s get people together, drink beer and teach each other how to increase your communications so that data logging is difficult.

PIA: There was a case study of people who had kids. We’re very security conscious. Maybe bad people could take them and you know take our children. Here is this story on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald with the parents, holding the children in swim suits and talking about how much they care about their privacy. Come on.

CHRIS.. What do we have from the ether? What will the wireless tell us? If you can get a microphone that works?

Technology is fantastic.

A question from Liam Comford from the Pirate Party Australia. He asked: are consumers making informed trade-offs. Do consumers have proper appreciation for how far-reaching the risks of their information of self- disclosure are. If not, what can be done about this?”

CHRIS: they’re not. I have basically no clue what the apps, what information the apps I use on my phone are giving to whoever it is, I don’t have a clue. I mean, I believe that if I use, if I get my apps through iTunes, there’s more of a chance I have protection than on android. I read that somewhere I and I don’t know if it’s true. That’s, and I consider myself to be reasonably okay about this stuff, I have no idea. I am going to move on to data retention.

Data retention: what do we think, good or bad?
Can we start with, can we start with you, Kurt. So, you know the prose – Data retention, two years, mega data, pretty much everything.

KURT: When this came up, I was practising in London and we wrote a paper for the House of Lords saying what the human rights and data protection records are with data protection. It’s the same as you see today. You have to look at it from two lenses. One is human rights law is a proportion natural, is it necessary in a democratic society, all the usual tests. And it’s questionable, it seems to me, to sort of gather information on everyone in the society, in case you lailter need to — later need to use it. But even from a data protection/ privacy act perspective, it is clearly an incursion of existing data protection/ privacy rights. I think it is a serious problem. I think it’s one that, you know t Europeans have already gone down that road and then there is, we’re starting to get pushback from the constitutional courts, but it’s tough. I have trouble seeing the notion that 23 million people need to be surveyed and — surveiled and capture whatever small percentage of criminals it is have to be captured.

CHRIS: it’s Australia, there’s a higher percentage here.

(LAUGHTER)

CHRIS: I will go to to this pirate gentleman here and then come back to the panel. While the microphone is coming, you’ve heard the argument: if you have nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about. We will talk about that in a minute.

GLENN: Glenn from Pirate Party.

CHRIS: speak up, slow down.

GLENN: if data protection is implemented currently to the report if in the process, we can’t verify the proposal because the Attorney General refuses to release the information on the draft legislation, what chilling effect do you think this will have on the way people use the Internet?

PIA: You guys are awesome as loaded questions.

CHRIS: as a lawyer, that’s referred to as a leading question! We will go to Cheryl and then Craig next.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: (Inaudible) in not providing the information needed on proper public debate and it’s to the Parliament they should fling the thing back in their face. Leaving process aside. What’s different about the proposition? An organisation could come and say that they need data retention and here’s that justification and we would need to argue it through. What is different? Why does this matter so much? It matters because hitherto our ephemeral conversations were that and didn’t end up tracked into files, we used to read things in libraries, we used to read things in our homes. It’s now trapped into protocols, trapped into logs. Every book your download is trapped into logs, it is behavioural privacy, not just our privacy. It is a’s — that is the chilling effect. Narell was trying to get it through to the committee. It’s hard to get basics through let alone the more subtle points. This audience is different, of course.

GLENN: You’re saying that mega data in a grey gate is content?

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: It is massive content. In the past suspicion had to exist about a person before the big guns could be rolled out and interception achieved. We all support that. A PF policy supports appropriate powers for law enforcement agencies. Ipso facto suspicions based on anything that turns out in the future to be a bad thing.

GLENN: that’s with the assumption that people who have access are good people.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: We don’t have — we don’t believe that in the APF. We say there will always be another bigotry. If you’re in Cambodia for a long time, a degree from a university is one you didn’t realise you will run into. There will always be new nasty things that turn up with ipso facto suspicion generation. They can mine for it because of the richness of what’s available and the power of the things we have. If we don’t teach our technology to forget, going back to Geoff’s point, we’re in deep trouble. Then I would worry about us having lost privacy. I haven’t, by the way, I don’t believe we have lost it, we will lose it, unless we act and beat off stupid things like the proposal.

CHRIS: who wants the next crack? Cheryl?

CHERYL: You said me. Hear, hear to the speakers. I agree if there is a like or dislike, it gets a big dislike from me. The thing that really worries me about this potential huge net dragging through the waters of everything we do digitally, and keeping it for the length of time that it is, is proposed to, is exactly the same rational as we think there might be a disease, and so we’re going to treat you with absolutely everything. We don’t know what the consequences of this is going to be. The unpredictabilities are not worth the risk of taking it. There is more than adequate, as has been discussed on this panel and earlier ones, ways of tracking the real bad guys when you have due process, and proper suspicion. But there is no transparency, there is no accountability, there is no ability for the individual to have what we’ve been talking about, informed consent, or knowledge of its use, how can you give away for a whole community, the right that they should have to know where their data is or isn’t being collected and stored? What worries me most is that it’s the purpose behind it. Because I’m already admitting to huge digital footprints being left in my wake, we’re all leaving them. They are so disorganised and so disparate, that it’s a huge effort.

Every one of the Twitter people or feeds I follow is analysed. You will learn a lot about me. It may not be a bad thing, but what, as Roger said, is huge change in the future?

PIA: I didn’t make it explicit, but I’m not speaking on behalf of any employers. I need to be clear about that. I have three problems with the data retention issue: the first one is it’s based on a faulty legal precedent. Apparently the European legal precedent has been overturned in European Courts and there is information today or tomorrow about that from the NSW Cyber Laws space centre thing, so that’s the first one. And that keeps getting references, you know, part of the precedents and you know, that’s a good thing it’s been overturned. The second thing is it’s not based on a good logical precedent. The quote, and I did a blog post about this issue and I quoted and there was a good story about it quite recently that was well researched and there was a quote there from the AFP saying that if we, I guarantee you if we don’t have access to this data, we can’t possibly catch anonymous. Now, there’s so many things wrong with that sentence, not least at all any geek worth their salt misbehaving knows how to encrypt, how to use proxies, how to do touring. The data retention won’t help catch these people. The premise is illogical. There is no evidence about how this will help people catch the bad guys. The third thing; the biggest one, whenever I explain this in normal words to normal people, they get enraged, but what happens is that the entire issue is part of the whole suite of issues which is geeks verses spooks playing out in gladiator war games in tiny dark corners and it is not a society-wide conversation about the Internet and society and what we are and are not happy to compromise on. We need to reframe this entire debate to be about what do we want, what do we not want and I’m running a workshop tomorrow, where I will do exactly that.

CHRIS: thank you. We are coming to the close. I think Pia had a –
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Pia had a car analogy.

PIA: I won’t advertise any more. If we went to the Australian society and said: we will put a tracker in your car. Everywhere that you, where you begin the trip, end the trip, everyone that gets in the car, but we won’t record what they say, we could, but we won’t. And people would go nuts. We all know we have the technology with phones, but if we actually proposed that, people would go crazy, yet that is meta data effectively.

CHRIS: I will take a couple of comments from the floor and close up with the panel. So, yes? Brief. And crisp. To the point.

JOHN: Current hat would be electronic function in Australia. The Attorney-General’s apartment will be appearing before the joint committee on intelligence and security at 3.45 tomorrow at Parliament House. Please come, unless there is something on here, of course.

I just wanted to follow up on Pia’s point about the European experience and just give a little bit of detail about those countries that have actually declared data retention to be unconstitutional. They are Germany, everyone’s heard of Nastazi and Bulgaria, which had an oppressive regime, they are Romania which had one of the most oppressive mass surveillance schemes; they are Czech Republic, which had similar experiences as well. If you look at these countries, these communities, these are societies that have genuine experience of what mass surveillance does to its society. They have said this stuff is not acceptable.

I think that is the way we need to look at this. We’re lucky in this country. We don’t experience this. We have no experience of what mass surveillance can do in terms of the corrosive effect on society and we’ve all talked about the issues. I could go on at length and I won’t.

You know, we need to learn from the experience of these societies and say this is not acceptable in this liberal democracy that we apparently live in.
CHRIS: good point. Thank you. (APPLAUSE)
JOHN: hopefully we don’t have to learn that through a world war or revolution.
PIA: We are in a revolution, man.

CHRIS: You’ll be first off – oh, never mind! (LAUGHTER).

Very quickly, please.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I think there are two sides today ta retention. There’s the public domain and then there’s the governmental one. I don’t know how many of you are aware unless you’ve just download your Medicare statement for your tax, but the Australia card has arrived, we haven’t looked in the mail. You cannot download a Medicare statement from Medicare unless you join Australia online, which links you to Centrelink and human services and the ATO. The four main services that the Federal fraudulent policing societies gather data from when they will prosecute you. So there you go. It’s already happening.

CHRIS: encouraging news. Very quickly, Geoff? Quick one from Geoff. I want 30 seconds to a minute of closing comments from panel.

GEOFF. I want to remind people when they consider data retention in the coming years. Two facts: we’ve run out of V4 addresses, right. And two, what that means for data retention. Because we’ve run out of the four addresses, carriers now have to put in carrier-grade nats. When you talk about the data gathered by ISPs, it is no longer the fact that you were online on this day and used that address. No, no, no. Many folk are using the same address. The data that will be created is which TPC sessions you opened to which address. Let me translate that. Every site you visit, every ad that gets delivered, every email is then logged. Everything. That’s the way carrier grade logs. It’s an enormous amount of data. But this is data that Google would kill for. This is you, in all of its gory detail. This is part of data retention. That’s a very spooky concept.

CHRIS: minute at the moment going down the line. Kurt.

KURT: I think what this shows is that this group which cares about Internet governance, the future of the Internet, has a huge stake in privacy. This isn’t just an issue we happen to care about because we care about a lot of issues that surround online activity. It goes to the trust that people put in the Internet, your ability, a medium for the future and core Internet governance issue, not just data retention, but privacy generally.

CHERYL: When I started off saying that privacy is a dream and a myth from the past, it’s also hugely important and something has to be on the current agenda. It’s all about informed and personal choice and control over data and its use.

CRAIG: While we should be concerned about data retention, we not be distracted by the data retention debate, and lose sight of the fact that data access is a more important issue. There’s data everywhere already. The question is who has access to that data and when. And I’m worried that this debate about data retention takes the focus away from access which I think is the bigger issue.

ROGER.. That merger of the larger control agencies in the VHS cluster has been brought to you by the perpetrators of the access card who were promoted to be the team that developed that process. Does that tell you something about the persistence of senior executives in government? Second point is that the John Lawrence down here, who produced himself from being from the FA is also a director of the Internet…

(LAUGHTER)

PIA.. I didn’t want to go into it. Briefly, I want to make one point to final Liz, but on that particular thing, the goal I think of privacy in terms of how government relates to citizens and I believe part of the goal of australia. gov.au, is to give people more permission about, not permission, but the ability to say, yes, I do, or don’t want to share particular types of data. I think that is a laudable thing that needs to be encouraged. I don’t think the goals of that website are about the goal. And the big thing is, the Internet, we’re limited by the fact that governments themselves are jurisdictional and geo-spatially jurisdictionally defined entities all trying to, from their tiny area, you know, putting limitation from how the Internet works, but the Internet is a global thing. And ultimately it’s not legislation that is going to protect people, people can protect people. We need to be better skilling our people and stopping the getting in the way of the Internet being the awesome thing it can be, has been and certainly will be.

Chris: FINALLY?
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: We can’t educate our children saying that privacy matters when the Government says it doesn’t.

CHRIS: Please join me in thanking the panel. (APPLAUSE)
Now, it’s afternoon tea time. It’s also ISOC AGM time. It doesn’t get much more exciting than this. We will reconvene here at 3.50. Ten to four for our final panel of the afternoon.
Please be on time. Thank you.

Thank you for using Red Bee Media Australia’s Live Remote Captioning Service.

Check out my “storify” stories which collate my experiences from the two days from my live Tweeting.

Hanging out with Hans Rosling, Rufus Pollock and Dr Tim Hubbard

Basically I’ve been working on open government and open data policy and projects for a while now and I realised I had a good opportunity to connect with practitioners and policy makers around the world. I really wanted to pick the brains of these people and also share what is happening locally to share, and to get some context on how we are going in a global context.

I found many surprising things, not least of all that we are actually comparatively quite well in Australia when you look around the world. Obviously we have a lot to learn and do but we are lucky in many respects, such as we have a relatively open democracy already. For instance, Hansard for Federal and State parliamentary reporting is far from perfect but many countries have abysmal parliamentary openness and transparency. It was quite a shock to realise how little the accountability some jurisdictions operate under. More on that later.

It was also very interesting to hear from over 20 countries on their open data initiatives, to attend technical sessions on publishing data, to hear about the European Commission investment in open data (substantial!), and to talk to people from over 15 countries involved in “apps contests” and other hackfests. There was a lot of interest in our GovHack model so there might be some grounds for collaboration there too.

I should also note that upon careful consideration, I thought it might be useful to bootstrap an OKFN Au local chapter in order to pull together all the open knowledge communities across Australia. Some network mechanism is needed as we have growing communities that are completely disconnected from one another. We could all benefit from some cross-disciplinary community development that includes cross promotion, discussions, aggregated events and news, tools for collaboration, support mechanisms (financial, insurance, legal, etc) and perhaps some events that bring us all together for mutual benefit.

So, this is my mother-of-all-posts report from the week. I will be blogging on some of the thoughts that have coalesced as a result later, but check out some of my highlights from the week below along with some really useful links. I’m also going to be working with the open government community people at OKFN to do an expanded open data census that looks at specific details of open data initiatives around the world to identify some good practice, policy commonalities and general information for people trying to do open data in government.

Open Government

The Open Government Partnership

Hanging out with Richard Akerman from Canada (@scilib)

The Open Government Partnership was a key theme for the conference, with over 55 countries now signed up in its first year. Signing up is not only a statement of commitment to this area, but countries have a series of targets on openness and transparency to meet. Apparently OGP has been slower to take off in Asia and Oceania, with only a few countries in this region getting involved to date.

Australia is unfortunately not yet signed up, and I hope that is rectified soon so Australia can more legitimately take our place in this space as something of an emerging leader. I had a lot of people interested in what Australia is doing at the conference from jurisdictions all around the world, and yet whenever we got to OGP discussions, there was not official Australian voice or commitment, which was disappointing. I hope this can be rectified soon, especially as the OGP commitments are already in line with so many existing policies in Australia.

Check out the infographic on the first year of progress of the OGP, and the draft strategic plan which is currently open for public comment.

There were several sessions on the OGP talking about standards, implementation challenges, and many representatives from supporting organisations like the World Bank who are investing in open government initiatives around the world.

Declaration of Parliamentary Openness

Afternoon tea with @anked & @kat_Braybrooke

The Declaration of Parliamentary Openness was launched quite recently as an outcome of a global meeting of parliamentary monitoring organisations (PMOs). It is quite an interesting document and again, possibly something Australia should consider signing up to.

NSW Member of Parliament the Hon. Penny Sharpe did a great speech on the Declaration of Parliamentary Openness for International Day of Democracy (September 15th) which happened to be whilst I was in Helsinki. Several people there were very excited about the speech and I was quite honoured to be cited in it Nice work Penny!

Check out some of the work from open parliaments around the world.

Open Data around the world

Gorgeous model in the basement of the uni

I managed to have a long sit down with the technical lead on data.gov.uk which was fantastic! It was great to get an idea of the model they use for publishing, the development work they have done, what resources they have an more.

My notes on the data.gov.uk discussion, with permission from their technical lead:

• Human resources for data.gov.uk - 3  full time resources only
• Uses CKAN – very happy with it, especially as they can easily develop additional functionality they need
• Every department and local authority has at least one data champion that does data publishing as part of their normal job, ~765 publishers
• Total cost of data.gov.uk only about 460k pound per year. 40k pound hosting and staff = most of the rest
• Primarily focused on publishing data in the best way possible. Not focused on datavis, but considering looking at drupal front end with ckan backend
• Departments are entirely responsibility for publishing their data. The full time staff look after the platform, do development where necessary (have created several plugins specific to their needs and open sourced them), provide technical support to publishers, but onus is on publishers
• data.gov.uk folk have built functionality to handle the structure of government, creating lists of “Publishers” which are individual agencies (etc), users have a list of what Publishers they have access to publish to. You can have hierarchies of Publishers to reflect interrelationships between Publishers
• An account API which could be the corporate API. Only publishers get API keys
• No token required for apps
• Antonio gave us a demonstration of uploading datasets, uploading had an option to choose whether a dataset is part of a time set
• All datasets are appended, content is not changed at all, “if you get into data changing you are dead”
• 5 star rating is helping improve quality of data publishing
• With a multiple data file time series, the API interrogates the entire set
• Contact details are available by dataset
• data.gov.uk do thematic theming, they have over 8000 tags in the system atm, and they created 6 themes: health, environment, education, finance (other things apart from spending), society, defence, transportation, spending data (where they spend money), government
• Automatic updates for some files via JSON but largely manual. Publishers felt more comfortable with manual publishing than aautomation for perceived control
• Tend to point to WMS servers for spatial data rather than host directly
• UK folk suggest a geoserver to host geospatial data and use open data platform to point to data rather than host it directly. A metadata harvester gets data from spatial sets and points to data. Needed to comply with the INSPIRE directive
• They don’t apply 5 star to mapped data (or other purely linked information) as it doesn’t exactly map to downloadable data star rating
• You can search on geospatial datasets by postcode or by drawing an area
• Found that within a minute and 15 seconds (the record) a user could go from not having used the site before to publishing data, very low transition from newbie to publisher which was important
• All statistics are automated which is due to being within the one dept and they are motivated to automated
• INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) Directive was a major driver, as was “digital by default”
• They generate monthly reports that counts the openness (stars) of data, the amount per Publisher, publishers with broken links, datasets with broken links. Helps publishers keep their data up to date
• data.gov.uk is building a dashboard to report by the hierarchy of government
• Public Roles and Salaries linked data tool – http://data.gov.uk/organogram/cabinet-office
• Blog post about plugins data.gov.uk have built, all freely available on github – http://data.gov.uk/blog/the-code-behind-datagovuk
• Indemnification from the Crown so public servants not at personal legal risk
• Started with the knowledge management people, then expanded. Basically all parts of the public service were told that this is what they must do, so they did it
• data.gov.uk is hosted by the government, Ubuntu servers
• data.gov.uk – metadata, almost a petabyte of data now
• US is running three open data platforms, including Socrata, CKAN and another bespoke one
• No inferred metadata – up to data publishers to provide metadata
• Real time data – can deal with real time, new functionality being also built
• The value of cloud service to scale with API requirements

For some technical details and the code behind data.gov.uk, check out http://data.gov.uk/blog/the-code-behind-datagovuk

Thanks Toni for your time!

Below are my live tweets on the open data country updates – each person had about 5 minutes to wrap up their country. I’ve put them in alphabetical order and the results were a fascinating snapshot. I wish I’d had more time to talk to each and every contributor:

• Argentina – created Ministry of Modernisation inc Buenos Aires Data, 3 hackathons, datavis, app comp, digital city event coming
• Australia – @piawaugh giving Australia report http://twitpic.com/avwd85
• Australia – What’s going on in#opendata in #australia ? Psi needs to be cc by default. http://instagr.am/p/Ptj4FUodS9/ by Lucy Chambers
• Australia – Not OGP members, national picture mixed, neat local efforts #okfest http://pic.twitter.com/l9u1JK1l by Tariq Khokar
• Belgium – some progress, inconsistent across region. Estonia: need to transform data that is published to use as hard atm.
• Brasil – have also done information asset catalogue to help facilitate future opendata.
• Brasil – new law created to get important datasets published, also have proactive publishing of source code. Cost seen as blocker
• Canada – over 12k datasets this year. Next gen platform deployed next year. Toronto building a city that thinks like the web
• Canada – lots of municipal level work, national level is participant in OGP with three pillars of opendata openinfo & opendialogue
• Chile – regulation around #opendata created but not implemented yet.
• Czech – working on apps&services based on opendata, OKFN local chapter, data catalogue & opendata.cz, 1st gov data blog. No money
• France – France presentation a reminder that open standards can actually be a blocker to first steps in opening data. #okfest
• France – talk from NosDeputes.fr, lots of cities putting data up, national now commit to open licence, formats an issue/blocker
• Germany case study of getting gov to open up some data, but really just getting stated.
• Ireland – new real time passenger info API coming this year, need national portal, still low priority for many but relatively cheap
• Ireland – 8-9 public bodies in Dublin regional opendata portal. Interested in biz models, datavis, 40% participants entrepreneurs
• Israel – black whole of legislation, printing protocols were hid in boxes. Volunteers went in to scan and digitise. Now gov opened
• Italy – National data portal, people need gov to open data, 3000 datasets liberati increase in data quality. Mostly in north
• Kenya – had one year birthday for Kenya opendata portal, focus on open standards, lots happening. No FOI leg yet, community devel
• Netherlands – parliamentary data opened, 1st budget open data tmrw, issues: budget cuts hard, slow grow, gov benefit realisation
• Netherlands – launched open data portal, gov stopped charging for geospatial data, $4m spent to free up satellite images…
• Nigeria – update data hard to get, oil companies & gov corruption high, have digitised & visualised budget -> public engagement
• Open Corporates – has info on 44,470,772 companies in the world. Open database of the corporate world. Interesting. Launched API
• Slovakia – bad news is a lot of new laws but the working group works are slow and projects at risk.
• Slovakia – launched open data portal, has preliminary support, worried about new gov not supporting but did, slow but building up
• South Africa – not so much, Kenya is ahead of us Gov have removed new order mining rights info from website & water quality data
• South Africa – info commissioner an important part to getting more transparency
• South Africa – 1st hackathon in Aug 2012, secrecy bill attempting to shut down access to data, civil society active, OGP work too
• Spain – lot of open data portals (~20), diverse, some good, some not. National portal is good but not much data. Big community tho
• UK – 8661 datasets on new site, good stats, worked with openspending ppl to do reporting & better tools. Increase in public trust
• Uruguay – Fascinating, gov working on data but dropping ball on other opengov #okfest
• US – several initiatives out of date and not detailed enough
• US – lots of stuff proposed, data laws, most of the work is overshadowed by Presidential election, OGP commitments being worked on.

Open Data Census – expand to capture information about individual initiatives?

OKFN have done a great job trying to get a useful comparative analysis of open data in countries around the world. I suggested it might be worthwhile to consider individual initiatives to get some understanding of exactly what is being done around the world, find commonalities and get some ideas around good practice in this space, especially as it is such a new area for so many people.

I put up some draft questions for the next Open Data Census and it’d be great to get feedback.

Outstanding talks I heard

There were many, many, outstanding talks at OKFestival. I’ll just briefly wrap up a few outstanding ones that I really enjoyed

Dr. Nagy-Rothengass from the European Commission

Dr Nagy-Rothengass gave a fascinating talk about the European Commission commitment to Open Data. They have committed substantial funding for this, around 100 million Euro and their core rationale for supporting open data are as follows:

1. Untapped business and economic opportunities: data is the new gold; possible direct and indirect gains of 140b Euro across the EU27
2. Better Governance and citizen empowerment: open data increases transparency, citizen participation and administrative efficiency and accountability.
3. Addressing societal challenges: data can enhance sustainability of health care systems, essential for tackling environmental challenges.
4. Accelerating scientific progress: e-science essential for meeting the challenges of the 21st century in scientific discovery and learning.

Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling was a brilliant keynote.

My favourite quotes from the talk:

• If you want to communicate with people you need to learn from tabloids. They are good at connecting with people.
• The problem is not that people don’t know anything about the world, the problem is they have a completely incorrect view. evidence & statistics show world population growing to about 10b after which it normalises.
• The western world has a toxic combination of arrogance and ignorance. Also gender equality doesn’t just happen. It requires work.
• D3 d3js.org as a great tool for #datavis
• We can’t rely on the leaders to deal with the money. We need to get involved and see for ourselves.
• Life has never been so good as today. That the world is bad today doesn’t mean it hasn’t become enormously better.
• We need to seriously invest in renewable energies & isn’t about polar bears. We are up against something much bigger.
• You have to demand access to the data. Countries should report & need to release big data so we can do better.
• OECD *sell* their data! We need to have it liberated so we can understand and learn.
• Don’t talk about what you should do, just mock up and prototype.

He went a little through his normal developing countries vs developed countries spiel which clearly demonstrates the world is a lot closer statistically than many people believe. He spoke about world population growth and showed that it is one of very few things that statisticians have been consistently correct about (with only a 6ish% deviation from projections over 50 years), and yet there is still a lot of fear and misinformation about population growth. He said based on projections and the massive slowdown of population growth, that the world population would peak at around 10 billion and then that number would largely be sustained, unless there was an enormous disaster.

He showed the importance of not dividing the world up into “developing” and “developed” and that people’s understanding of the world is typically quite out of date, based on figures and perspectives taught in school but not updated throughout adult life. This leads to a community making decisions based on outdated information which leads to bad decisions. It was humbling to see actual statistics and realise that we don’t really have embedded societal mechanisms to update what is taught at school, and how this creates a perception of other countries and cultures that may fall completely out of date within just a few years.

Personally I believe strongly that it is through global collaboration that we can leapfrog issues and many of the attendees from what are traditionally call “developing” nations had great stories to tell of citizen empowerment and leapfrogging “developed” countries.

Hans core messages so far as I understood them included the importance of open data to make good decisions, the importance of recognisiing that our understanding of the world is usually out of date, and the importance of the active engagement of civil society in international and national matters to balance out the imbalance of power.

This last point he demonstrated very effectively by showing a picture of world leaders at the Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy, with some information about which countries were loaning/giving money to others. It was fascinating. Aid money being given from one country to a “developing” country, which was in turn was loaning $30b to the US (when George Bush was in), who was in turn supporting them to get a seat on a UN council. It goes round and round.

Hans made a strong point that people should demand the data and transparency so they can make more informed decisions as a community and not just leave things up to world leaders.

Click through on the following thumbnails to see larger versions.

Rufus Pollock

Rufus is the Director and co-founder of OKFN, and quite an impressive figure. He is passionate about open data and is credited by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as being behind the “Raw Data Now” agenda. Rufus gave a great opening keynote where he spoke about the importance of open data combined with analysis and action. He said we have now started to see more and more data being opened up but if we don’t combine this with good analysis and then action in response to the analysis, then we will not see the benefits of open data.

His speech was largely a spoken version of his blog post called Managing Expectations II: Open Data, Technology and Government 2.0 – What Should We, And Should We Not Expect so I recommend you check it out

Diagram from Rufus Pollock on a theory of change

My contributions to OKFestival

Just a couple of notes for people I met there on my contributions.

I hosted a panel on open government, I contributed to several forums and I spoke on the closing panel with Philip Thigo (Program Associate at SODNET & Co-Founder of INFONET, Nairobi, Kenya) & Antti Poikola (OKF Finland Incubating Chapter, Helsinki) which gave me a good opportunity to further discuss the role of the public service in open government. This was received really well and I have a load of public service colleagues now from all around the world in this space.

On a panel about open data and culture at OKFest 2012 with Philip Thigo, Program Associate at SODNET & Co-Founder of INFONET, Nairobi, Kenya & Antti Poikola, OKF Finland Incubating Chapter, Helsinki. Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/tuija/8008433837/

I spoke a little bit about public engagement on public policy and mentioned the Public Sphere methodology that I developed with Senator Kate Lundy. The most recent consultation was one on Digital Culture which was a major contribution to the impending National Cultural Policy. A lot of people asked about analysis, so I spoke a little about the importance for both data analysis and “network” analysis of a consultation to ensure the outcomes have the appropriate context. See the Analysing the community of a public sphere blog post on Senator Lundy’s site.

I also mentioned my Distributed Democracy idea which a few people liked

Other links of possible interest:

• My blog – which has posts on Gov 2.0, Internet culture, open Internet, open government more broadly and my thoughts on life, the universe and everything going back to 2003
• The Australian Declaration of Open Government
• The Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report – basis of open gov in Australia
• Ahead of the game – the blueprint for the direction of the public service
• AGIMO (the Federal agency responsible for Gov 2.0) and their blogpost Progress on Government 2.0
• The great work and papers by the Office of the Australian Information Commission and open data as a way to mitigate the rising costs of FoI
• The Statement of Intellectual Property Principles for Australian Government by the Federal Attorney-General, Creative Commons as the default
• Also a more in depth list of examples of Gov 2.0 from Australia was presented by Minister Lundy at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington DC a couple of years ago. Obviously there are more recent examples too, but this is a good list
• The Australian Government Innovation blog – has regular news and is quite interesting.

GovHack and App4Country discussion

I was involved in a wonderful discussion with people from over 17 countries who do “apps” competitions and hackfests. It was great to hear about their initiatives and to share the lessons learnt from GovHack. Many of them expressed a lot of interest in our model which is a little broader than the “Apps4Country” model which has been quite popular in Europe. Most of them had the same problems with sustainability, longevity of outcomes from the hackfests, getting the government actively engaged. It was fascinating.

There are some good notes from the global hackfest/apps events collated here and there is a global mailing list (not very active atm) at http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/appsforx.

The notes I made for my presentation about GovHack:

• Narrative, design *and* hacks
• Not focused on apps, but rather hacks (apps, mashups & datavis) – often applications emerge but “apps development” creates confusion with mobile vs web vs devel vs datavis
• GovHack was part of a trilogy of events – GovCamp to set the narrative and vision, GovUX/Jam to apply design thinking to service delivery challenges in the public service, GovHack for open hacking and to make some service delivey design outcomes real
• Open Government, Science & Digital Humanities – to add Data Journalism
  - Amazing how much of an impact it made, has really fired the imagination of the public and sector.
• Enormous enthusiasm from the gov involved, 7 departments and agencies from federal and state governments were deeply engaged.
• People flew from all over Australia to the two locations that we were simultaneously running the hackfest to participate.
• Mentors from data owners and technologists to support teams along with sessions.
• Made the documentation and presentation of the hack part of the judging criteria, which compelled teams to nicely capture content about their hacks which meant a good archive of the event.

Motivations:

• Bring community together
• Demonstrate value of open data
• Raise the bar for the narrative in Aus, focus efforts on constructive efforts
• Open the data, give depts buy in, connect their tech with community and leaders with success
• Create new ways to do service delivery that can be integrated into gov, fundamentally disrupt gov expectations around “innovation”
• Volunteer run which gave it extra credibility, buy in, and public engagement
• A lot of bad expectations of “apps competitions” because of events that have done it badly, in Aus and internationally
• Open Sourced hacks for people/companies/students/gov to build upon

Lessons learnt:

• Hackers are motivated so long as you create some importance, and engage in conversation to manage tone and deal constructively with trolls
• Prize money is helpful, but need to be careful to ensure good community, tone, “spirit of govhack” award
• Scaling to go national – hackfest for two days, 3 days to vote, awards ceremony, followup 6 months later.
• More funding would be useful
• Ensure non tech elements encouraged, some great non “app” outcomes, eg the jewellery hack
• Engage with the startup and VC sector, open sourcing outcomes means govhack can be yearly incubator for spin offs as well as input to gov. Startups love it as it is the best form of publicity
• Non geeky hacks are the most reportable – History in ACTION
• Technologists have a lot to contribute to policy, and there is a lot of work now to bring these groups together. Data visualisation and other uses of data can massively contribute to policy development and better policy outcomes.
• Ongoing community engagement could be achieved through launching OKFN Au chapter to bring together communities across the gov, data journalists, hacker/geek communities and academia/research.

Interesting thoughts from “apps” conversation:

• Need to strongly socialise – Finland
• Apps for Europe, Spain, lessons from @aabella: 1) Civil society not politicians. Pollies have a role but it needs to be civil society driven. 2) Need to target general population not just tech community, get broader community involved.

Some additional links collected from the week of interest

• Links from Canada:
• OpenPolicy
• GCPedia
• Open Government Data Census
• The Web Index

Some random Open Science links sent:

• http://biologyistechnology.com/
• http://www.synthesis.cc/library/Building_a_21st_Century_Bioeconomy.pdf
• http://www.synthesis.cc/Carlson_Bioeconomic_Proliferation_Final_edited_for_public_release.pdf

Thanks

For the first time I tried couch surfing on this trip and stayed with a lovely Helsinki resident called Tarmo. A huge thanks to Tarmo for having me for the week, it was great to meet and I have to say, the couchsurfing culture is really friendly and lovely

Also, a huge thanks to Rufus for encouraging me to come, to Daniel Dietrich for his dedication to the open government space, and all the lovely people I met. I look forward to next year